I! 1 



SELECTIONS 
FROM 
ENGUSH 
PROSE 



BURNS 



' 11. 1,' 

■ll !h " ii 




Class _/^^/r_/iC 

Book l_j_/^X_ 

Copyright N" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



%^t %a}{t0ine ^etit^ ot €m\i&^ laeaHingd 



Selections from 



ENGLISH PROSE 



LAMB, BURKE, LANDOR 



Edited and arranged by 
J. J, BURNS, A.M., Ph.D. 






Chicago : 

AINSWORTH & COMPANY 

1903 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Receivpi^ 

SEP 2 1903 

Copyright Entiy 
CUSS <5L- XXc No 

(:, f f OQ 

COPY B. 




<& 



^t<'>^ 



The selections in this volume are taken 
from the editor's larger book "Some Un- 
setting Lights of English Literature." 
The pages are numbered in the order of 
that book and are not consecutive here. 

L. C. 49, 50, 55, 56. 



Copyright 1903 
By.AlNfewbRTH & Company 



PREFACE. 



The riches of scholarship, the benignities of Uterature, 
, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the 
reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be in- 
herited, so they cannot be alienated. But they may be 
shared. . . . 

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability 
to read means? That it enables us to see with the keenest 
eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest 
voices of all time? . . . 

Every book we read may be made a round in the ever- 
lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge, and 
to that temperance and serenity of mind which, as it is 
the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the sweetest. But this 
can only be if we read such books as make us think, and 
read them in such a way as helps them to do so ; that is, 
by endeavoring to judge them, and thus to make them 
an exercise rather than a relaxation of the mind. — Lowell's 
Books and Libraries. 

It is confidently believed that each selection in this 
volume, being among the best of its kind, may be made a 
round in the ladder of which Lowell speaks, that the 
climber may gather from that footing certain fruits of 
knowledge and meanwhile enjoy the sweet blossoms of 
literature. 

As literature's large book grows larger other essayists 
since Lamb have appeared and, in the English tongue 
have ^^Titten wisely or wittily or learnedly about society, 
morals, books, but when the style, the flowering of the 



iv SELECTIONS FROM ENGLISH PROSE 

spirit of the writer, is commented upon, the highest praise 
with which any one of them is garlanded is that he re- 
minds the reader of Lamb. 

Lamb wrote to Coleridge: " You will find your old 
associate, in his second volume, dwindled into prose and 
criticism. . . . or is it that as years come upon us. 
Life itself loses much of its Poetry for us? We tran- 
scribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature; 
and as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look 
another way. You yourself write no Christabels nor 
Ancient Mariners now;" and then Lamb looks back to 
the time "when life was fresh, and topic exhaustless, 
and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the 
love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." In one of 
his essays we read: If thy heart overfloweth to lend 
them, lend thy books ; but let it be to such a one as S. T. 
C. (Coleridge) : he will return them with usury, enriched 
with annotations tripling their value. I have had ex- 
perience." 

Speaking of the English orators of the times of the 
French Revolution, Taine wrote : " Force is their char- 
acteristic, and the characteristic of the greatest among 
them, the first mind of the age, Edmund Burke." In 
Green's Short History we read: "Forty years before, 
Burke had come to London as a poor and unknown 
Irish adventurer. The learning which made him at once 
the friend of Johnson and Reynolds, and the imaginative 
power which enabled him to give his learning a living 
shape, promised him a philosophical and literary career; 
but instinct drew Burke to poHtics ; he became secretary 
to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament 



SELECTIONS FROM ENGLISH PROSE v 

under his patronage. His speeches on the Stamp Acts 
and the American War soon lifted him into fame.'' 

It is John Morley's deliberate judgment that "Burke 
is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels 
in the prose of our English tongue.'! 



The name of Landor is not so familiar to the ear of 
readers in general as those of the other authors here pre- 
sented, but these selections are given with the hope that 
they may prove an introduction to many who will fall in 
love with Landor's charming English and thus add 
another to their list of literary intimates. 

Concerning the single but random sketch at the in- 
troduction of each author I would say, it is easily skipped 
but I hope that will not be its uniform fate. The foot- 
notes might have been included in the above gracious 
hint and protest. To give aid to those who need it is 
their one purpose. Something can be said in an en- 
deavor to justify the existence of notes, but it is much 
easier to be witty in the negative, and show examples of 
annotation run wild. 

I suppose that the proper note is one which aptly 
meets a question when the answer cannot be drawn from 
the context and is not found in a common dictionary; 
which gives just what help is needed for the full compre- 
hension of the passage. 




CHARLES LAMB 



CHARLES LAMB. 

1775-1833- 

A BIOGRAPHICAL skctcli of the illimitable Lamb is fur- 
nished us by his own artist hand ; " autobiographical," 
I should say ; and autobiography, as some brave punster 
once defined the word, is what " biography ought to be." 

Charles Lamb, born in the Inner Temple, loth of 
February, 1775, educated in Christ's Hospital; afterward 
a clerk in the Accountant's Office, East India House; 
pensioned off from that service 1825, after 33 years' serv- 
ice ; is now a gentleman at large ; can remember few 
specialities of his life worth noting, except that he 
once caught a swallow flying (teste sua maim) ; below the 
middle stature; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no 
Judaic tinge in his complexional religion ; stammers 
abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his 
occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a poor 
quibble, than in set and edifying speeches ; has conse- 
quently been libeled as a person always aiming at wit, 
which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him 
with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. 
A small eater, but not drinker; confesses a par- 
tiality for the production of the juniper berry; was a 
fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a vol- 
cano burnt out, emitting only now and then a casual puff. 
Has been guilty of obtruding upon the public a tale in 
prose, called Rosamund Gray; a dramatic sketch, en- 
titled John Woodvil; a Farczvell Ode to Tobacco; with 
sundry other poems and light prose matter, collected 

287 



288 CHARLES LAMB 

in two slight crown octavos, and pompously christened 
His Works, though in fact they were his recreations, 
and his true works may be found on the shelves of Lead- 
enhall Street, filling some hundred folios. He is also the 
true " Elia," whose essays are extant in a little volume, 
published a year or two since, and rather better known 
from that name without a meaning, than from anything 
he has done or can hope to do in his own. He also 
was the first to draw attention to the old English drama- 
tists in a work called Specimens of Dramatic Writers 
Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, published 
about fifteen years since. In short, all his merits and 
demerits to set forth would take to the end of Mr. 
Upcott's book, and then not be told truly. 

He died i8 , much lamented. 

Witness his hand, 
April i8, 1827. Charles Lamb. 

In Coleridge's Table Talk is the prediction : " The 
place which Lamb holds and will continue to hold in 
English literature seems less liable to interruption than 
that of any other writer of our day.' 

Coleridge's look ahead did not deceive him. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 
TEMPLE 



I I ^ WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my 
life, in the temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its 
fountain, its river, I had almost said, — for in those 
young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a 
stream that watered our pleasant places ? — these are of 
the oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses 
to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, 
than those of Spenser,^ where he speaks of this spot : — 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant" spot in the metropolis. 
What a transition for a countryman visiting London for 
the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or 
Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent 
ample squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheer- 
ful, liberar look hath that portion of it, which from three 
sides, overlooks the greater garden : that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, 



* We learn much about " St. Charles," as Thackeray called him, 
in this essay ; something, in every one. 

* The author of The Faerie Queene, the greatest poetic allegory 
in English, lived in " the spacious times of great Elizabeth." 

289 



290 ESSAYS OF ELM 

confronting with massy contrast, the hghter, older, more 
fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the 
cheerful Crown-office Row (place of my kindly engen- 
dure°), right opposite the stately stream, which washes 
the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted 
waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham 
Naiads! a man would give something to have been born 
in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine 
Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have 
made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astound- 
ment of young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not 
being able to guess at its recondite" machinery, were 
almost tempted to hail the wondrous works as magic! 
What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, 
with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals" with that 
Time which they measured, and to take their revelations 
of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspond- 
ence with the fountain of light! How would the dark 
line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of child- 
hood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice 
as an evanescent" cloud, or the first arrest" of sleep ! ^ 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand 

Steal from his. figure, and no pace perceived ! 

2 What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- 
bowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness 
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like 
structure, and silent heart-language of the old diall It 
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is 
it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be 
superseded" by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, 

' Stopping of consciousness by sleep. 



CHARLES LAMB 291 

its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It 
spoke of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted 
after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. It was the 
primitive clock, the horologe * of the first world. Adam 
could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the meas- 
ure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring 
by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, 
for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd 
" carved it out quaintly in the sun ; " and, turning philoso- 
pher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes 
more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device 
of the gardener, i^ecorded by Marvell,'^ who, in the days 
of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and 
, flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for 
they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty 
delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in 
a talk of fountains, and sundials. He is speaking of 
sweet garden scenes : — 

What wondrous life is this I lead! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine and curious peach 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
Withdraws into its happiness. 
The mind, that ocean, where each kind 



* " The horologe of Eternity 

Sayeth this incessantly, — 
' Forever — never.' " 

— Longfellow. 
•An English poet — 1620-1678; at one time assistant Latin sec- 
retary to Milton. 



2 92 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these. 

Far other worlds, and other seas. 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 

Or at some fruit tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside. 

My soul into the boughs does glide; 

There, like a bird, it sits and sings, 

Then whets and claps its silver wings. 

And, till prepared for longer flight. 

Waves in its plumes the various light. 

How well the skilful gardener drew. 

Of flowers and herbs, this dial new. 

Where, from above, the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant zodiac run 

And, as it works, the industrious bee 

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers? 

3 The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like 
manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or 
bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that little 
green nook behind the South-Sea House,*' what a fresh- 
ness it gives to the dreary pile ! Four little winged mar- 
ble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out 
ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the 
square of Lincoln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they 
were figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. 
The fashion, they tell me is gone by, and these things 
are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, 
by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were chil- 
dren once. They are awakening images to them at least. 



' Lamb's essay. The South-Sea House, makes the reader think of 
Hawthorne's The Custom House. 



CHARLES LAMB 293 

Why must everything smack of man and mannish? Is 
the world all grown up ? Is childhood dead ? Or 
is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best 
some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest 
enchantments? The figures were grotesque. Are the 
stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter 
about that area, less Gothic in appearance? or is the 
splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and 
innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded" 
cherubs uttered? 

4 They have lately gothicized ^ the entrance to the Inner 
Temple-hall, and the library front; to assimilate them, 
I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not 
at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse 
that stood over the former ? a stately arms ! and who has 
removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized 
the end of the Paper Buildings ? — my first hint of alle- 
gory ! They must account to me for these things, which 
I miss so greatly. 

5 The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the 
parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps 
which made its pavement awful ! It is become common 
and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to 
themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They 
might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress as- 
serted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, 
when you passed them. We walk on even terms with 

their successors. The roguish eye of J 11, ever ready 

to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie° 
a repartee" with it. But what insolent familiar durst 



' made Gothic in its style. 



294 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

have mated° ^ Thomas Coventry ? — whose person was a 
quadrate/ ^ his step massy and elephantine, his face 
square as the Hon's, his gate peremptory" and path-keep- 
ing, indivertible" from his way as a moving column, the 
scarecrow of his inferiors, the browbeater of equals and 
superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he 
came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they 
would have shunned an Elisha bear.^" His growl " was 
as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in 
mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory° notes being, indeed, of 
all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, ag- 
gravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from 
each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it not 
by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under 
the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; 
his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinc- 
tured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of 
obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. 
6 By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; 
the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, 
and had nothing but that and their benchership in com- 
mon. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a stanch 
tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — 
for Coventry had a rough spinous ^^ humor — at the po- 
litical confederates of his associate, which rebounded from 
the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from 
wool. You could not rufile Samuel Salt. 



* matched. 

* four-square. 

" One of the breed that wrought vengeance upon the mockers 
of Elijah. 

" "A voice as deep as a thunder-growl." — Hawthorne. 
" prickly. 



CHARLES LAMB 295^ 

7 S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, 
and of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of 
the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to 
much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, 
testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily 
handed it over with a few instructions to his man Level, 
who was a quick little fellow, and would dispatch it out 
of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which 
he had an uncommon share. It was incredible what re- 
pute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. 
He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a minute, — 
indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet 
men would give him credit for vast application, in spite 
of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with 
impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he 
forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some 
other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye 
upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave 
him his cue.° If there was anything which he could 
speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it. He was to 
dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on 
the day of her execution ; — and L., who had a wary 
foresight of his probable hallucinations," before he set 
out, schooled him with great anxiety not in any possible 
manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised 
faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been 
seated in the parlor, where the company was expecting 
the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in 
the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of win- 
dow, and pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary motion 
with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day," and added, 
" Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." 



296 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was 
thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit 
person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining 
to the law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrass- 
ments of conduct — from force of manner entirely. He 
never laughed. He had the same good fortune among 
the female world, — was a known toast° with the ladies, 
and one or two are said to have died for love of him — 
I suppose, because he never trifled or talked gallantry 
with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common atten- 
tions. He had a fine face and person, but wanted, me 
thought, the spirit that should have shown them off with 
advantage to the women. His eye lacked luster." 
8 Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of 
that name. He passed his youth in contracted circum- 
stances, which gave him early those parsimonious" habits 
which in after-life never forsook him; so that, with one 
windfall" ^* or another, about the time I knew him he 
was master of four or five hundred thousand pounds ; 
nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived 
in a gloomy house opposite the pump in Sergeant's-inn, 
Fleet Street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed pen- 
ance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. 
C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he sel- 
dom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer ; 
but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his 
window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watchj, 



" " And then he drew a dial from his poke, 
And, looking on it with lack-luster eye, 
Says very wisely, ' It is ten o'clock.' " 

— As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7. 
'* bequest, something which came to him without his own exer- 
tion, as the wind brings down fruit and sometimes trees. 



CHARLES LAMB 297 

as he said, " the maids drawing water all day long." 
I suspect he had his within-door reasons for the prefer- 
ence. Hie ciirrus et anna fucre.^^ He might think his 
treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a 
strong-box. C. was a close hunks° — a hoarder rather 
than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes 
breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, 
which cannot exist without certain admirable points of 
steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true 
miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By 
taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with 
the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous 
fellows halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. 
gave away £30,000 at once in his lifetime to a blind 
charity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, 
but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know 
who came in and who went out of his house, but his 
kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze.^^ 
9 Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew 
what he was worth in the world ; and having but a com- 
petency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little 
calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he 
had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care 
of everything. He was at once his clerk, his good serv- 
ant, his dresser, his friend, his " flapper," his guide, stop- 
watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without con- 
sulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting 
and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost 
too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in 

" " hie illius anna. 
Hie curriis fuit." — Here her arms, here her chariot was. Lamb 
quotes with a free hand. 
' ^''grow cold. 



298 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a 
master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment 
that he was a servant. 

ID I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible" 
and losing honesty." A good fellow withal, and " would 
strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never consid- 
ered inequalities, or calculated the number of his oppo- 
nents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a 
man of quality that had drawn upon him ; and pommeled 
him severely with the hilt of it. The swords-man had 
offered insult to a female — an occasion upon which no 
odds against him could have prevented the interference 
of Lovel. He would stand next day bareheaded to the 
same person, modestly to excuse his interference — for 
L. never forgot rank, where something better was not 
concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breath- 
ing, had a face as gay as Garrick's,^^ whom he was said 
greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which con- 
firms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — 
next to Swift and Prior ^^ — molded heads in clay or 
plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural 
genius merely ; turned cribbage boards, and such small 
cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at quadrille or 
bowls with equal facility, made punch better than any 
man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips 
and conceits; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries 



" " Once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous." 
— Macanlay's Moore's Life of Byron. 

" A most noted actor of Shakespeare's dramas ; had been a 
pupil of Dr. Johnson. 

" Poets of the time of Addison and Pope. S. now best known 
as the author of Gulliver; P. scarcely known at all, though 
Johnson says he " burst out from an obscure original to great emi- 
nence." Sic transit. 



CHARLES LAMB 299 

and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother 
of the angle moreover, and just such a free, hearty, hon- 
est companion as Mr. Izaac Walton ^° would have chosen 
to go a-fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the 
decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage 
of human weakness — "a remnant most forlorn of what 
he was," — yet even then his eye would light up upon the 
mention of his favorite Garrick. He was greatest, he 
would say, in Bayes — " was upon the stage nearly 
throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." 
At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and 
how) he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to serv- 
ice, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and 
how he returned, after some few years' absence, in his 
smart new livery, to see her, and she blessed herself at the 
change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it 
was " her own bairn." And then, the excitement sub- 
siding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second 
childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon 
her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long 
time after received him gently into hers. 
II With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon 
the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to 
make up a third. They did not walk linked arm in arm 
in those days — " as now our stout triumvirs sweep the 
streets," — but generally with both hands folded behind 
them for state, or with one at least behind, the other 
carrying a cane. Pierson was a benevolent, but not a 
prepossessing, man. He had that in his face which you 
could not term unhappiness; it rather implied an inca- 

^ The noted fisherman of literature ; author of The Oompleat 
Angler. 



30O ESSAYS OF ELI A 

pacity of being happy. His cheeks were colorless even 
to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but 
without his sourness) that of our great philanthropist.-^ 
I know that he did good acts, but I could never make 
out what he was. Contemporary" with these, but sub- 
ordinate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he 
walked burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Cov- 
entry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his pro- 
totype." Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the 
strength of being a tolerable antiquarian," and having a 
brother a bishop. When the account of his year's treas- 
ureship came to be audited, the following singular charge 
was unanimously disallowed by the bench. " Item, dis- 
bursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings, for 
stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." 
12 Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who 
took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the 
parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answer- 
ing to the combination rooms at College — much to the 
easement of his less epicurean" brethren. I know nothing 
more of him. Then Read, and Twopeny — Read, good- 
humored and personable — Twopeny, good-humored, but 
thin, and felicitous" in jests upon his own figure. If 
T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. 
Many must remember him (for he was rather of later 
date) and his singular gait, which was performed by 
three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps 
were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk ; 
the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. 
Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I 

^* Dr. Johnson. 



CHARLES LAMB Soi 

could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, 
nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than com- 
mon walking. TJie extreme tenuity° of his frame, I sus- 
pect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Two- 
peny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail 
him' as a brother Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a joke. 
His features were spiteful. I have heard that he would 
pinch his cat's ears extremely, when any thing had of- 
fended him. 

13 Jackson — the omniscient" Jackson he was called — 
was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing 
more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. 
He was the Friar Bacon ^- of the less literate portion of 
the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage, of the cook 
applying to him, with much formality of apology, for 
instructions how to write down edge bone of beef in his 
bill of commons." ^' He was supposed to know, if any 
man in the world did. He decided the orthography to 
be — as I have given it — fortifying his authority with 
such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple" (for 
the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, per- 
versely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between 
its shape and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had 
almost forgotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he 
was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by 
some accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, 
which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected 
the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether 
it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment 



" 1 2 14-1292. See three pages of wonderful interest in Green's 
Shorter History of England. " First in the great roll of modern 
science (is) the name of Roger Bacon." 

*»bill of fare. 



302 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking per- 
son; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an 
emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the fore- 
head of Michael Angelo's Moses.-* Baron Maseres, who 
walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign 
of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections 
of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. 
14 Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like 
of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inex- 
plicable," half-understood appearances, why comes in 
reason to tear away the prenatural mist, bright or gloomy, 
that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure 
in my relation, who made up to me, — to my childish eyes 

— the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw 
Gods, as " old men covered with a mantle " walking upon 
the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — 
extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary 
fabling, in the hearts of childhood, there will, forever, 
spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition, 
— the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, aad vital 

— from every-day forms educing the unknown and un- 
common. In that little Goshen -^ there will be light, 
when the grown world flounders about in the darkness 
of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while 
dreams, reducing '*" childhood, shall be left, imagination 
shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the 
earth. 



'^A great painting by Angelo. 

''The part of Egypt wherein Pharaoh allowed Jacob and his 
descendants to settle. 

^" bringing back childhood, making it " a visible thing on which 
the sun is shining." — Wordsworth. 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 



1 Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet 
mean ; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and 
clamors of the multitude ; would'st thou enjoy at once 
solitude and society ; would'st thou possess the depth of 
thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from 
the consolatory faces of thy species ; would'st thou be 
alone, and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not desolate ; 
singular, yet not without some to keep thee in counte- 
nance ; a unit in aggregate ; a simple in composite : — 
come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 

2 Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds 
were made " ? go not out into the wilderness ; descend 
not into the profundities" of the earth ; shut not up the 
casements ; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, 
with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses.^ — Retire with 
me into a Quakers' Meeting, 

3 For a man to refrain even from good words, and to 
hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, 
it is great mastery. 

4 What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this 
place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes? — 
here the goddess reigns and revels. — " Boreas, and Cesias, 
and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding 
uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of 
the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds - — than 
their opposite ( Silence her sacred self ) is multiplied 

^ Ulysses so secured the ears of his sailors against the allure- 
ment of the Sirens, but had himself tied to a mast. 
* Where many silences are " clubbed," or united. 



304 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. 
She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation 
itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes 
would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 

5 There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot 
heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoy eth 
by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes 
attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a 
Quakers' Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly un- 
derstand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian 
solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's 
want of conversation. The Carthusian ^ is bound to his 
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. 
In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading 
a book through a long winter evening, with a friend 
sitting by — say, a wife — he, or she, too (if that be 
probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral 
communication ? — can there be no sympathy without the 
-gabble of words ? — away with this inhuman, shy, single, 

shade- and cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master 
Zimmermann,* a sympathetic solitude. 

6 To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some 
cathedral, time-stricken ; 

Or under hanging mountains. 
Or by the fall of fountains; 

is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those 
enjoy who come together for the purposes of more com- 
plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be 
felt." — The Abb?y Church of Westminster hath nothing 
so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and 

^ A member of an old religious order in France, at Chartreuse. 
* Author of a bc'»k on Solitude. 



CHARLES LAMB 305 

benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no 
inscriptions, — 

Sands, ignoble things, 
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings: 
but here is something which throws Antiquity herself 
into the foreground — Silence — eldest of things — lan- 
guage of old Night — primitive Discourse — to which 
the insolvent" decays of moldering grandeur have but 
arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural pro- 
gression. 

How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 

Looking tranquillity ! ° 
7 Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous 
synod ! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without 
debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to 
consistory ° ! — if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply 
it will wander — yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wis- 
dom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest 
peace, which some out-welling tears would rather con- 
firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your be- 
ginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewes- 
bury.' I have witnessed that which brought before my 
eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests 
and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican 
or royalist, sent to molest you, — for ye sat betwixt the 
fires of two persecutions, the outcast and offscouring of 
church and presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, 
who had wandered into your receptable with the avowed 



^ "How reverend is the face of this tall pile, 

Looking tranquillity. " — Congreve. 

6 Eminent early Quakers. Fox is said to have been the first of 
his sect to be called "Quaker." 



3o6 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit 
of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and pres- 
ently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I re- 
member Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail- 
dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and 
" the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his 
feet." 

8 Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would rec- 
ommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read 
Sewel's " History of the Quakers." It is in folio, and 
is the abstract of the Journals of Fox and the primitive 
Friends. If is far more edifying and affecting than any- 
thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here 
is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, 
no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg° of the worldly 
or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story 
of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath 
been a byword in your mouth) — James Naylor: what 
dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even 
to the boring through of his tongue with redhot irons, 
without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, 
when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigma- 
tized" iot blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, 
he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautiful- 
est humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker 
still! — so different from the practice of your common 
converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize," 
apostatise all, and think they can never get far enough 
from the society of their former errors, even to the re- 
nunciation of some saving truths, with which they had 
been mingled, not implicated. 

9 Get the writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love 
the early Quakers. 



CHARLES LAMB 307 

How far the followers of these good men in our days 
have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion 
they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits 
can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assem- 
blies, upon which the dove sat visibly brooding. Others 
again I have watched, when my thoughts should have 
been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect 
nothing but a blank inanity." But quiet was in all, 
and the disposition to unanimity and the absence of 
the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual pre- 
tensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they 
make few pretenses. Hypocrites they certainly are not 
in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see 
one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and 
then a trembling, female, generally ancient voice is heard 
— you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it 
proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying 
out a few words which " she thought might suit the con- 
dition of some present," with a quaking difference, which 
leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female 
vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of 
tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for 
what I have observed, speak seldomer. 
10 Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a 
sample of the old Foxian orgasm.' It was a man of giant 
stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have 
danced " from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His 
frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him 
shake all over with the spirit — I dare not say of delu- 
sion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable — 
he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw 



^ excitement, as in the days of Fox. 



3o8 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail — his 
joints all seemed loosening — it was a figure to set off 
against Paul Preaching — the words he uttered were few, 
and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — keep- 
ing down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, 
than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had 
been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of 
a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the im- 
pression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, 
with something like a smile, to recall the striking incon- 
gruity° of the confession — understanding the term in its 
worldly acceptation — with the frame and physiognomy 
of the person before me. His brow would have scared 
away the Levites — the Jocos Risus-que ^ — faster than 
the Loves fled the face of Dis ^ at Enna. By zmt, even 
in his youth, I will be sworn, he understood something 
far within the limit of an allowable liberty. 
II More frequently the Meeting is broken up without 
a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. 
You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You 
have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; '" or as 
in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild 
creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely 
lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. 
O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness 
of the janglings, nonsense-noises of the world, what a 
balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a 
quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, 
among the gentle Quakers! 



^ Jokers and laughers. 

8 Pluto. 

1" Builder of the first temple at Delphi, 



CHARLES LAMB 



309 



Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniform- 
ity, tranquil and herd-like — as in the pasture — "forty 
feeding like one." 

The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of 
receiving a soil ; and cleanhness in them to be something 
more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress 
is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their 
Whitsun^^-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of 
the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, 
they show like troops of the Shining Ones. 



" Seventh Sunday after Easter, 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 



1 The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, 
its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter 
state of men, when dinners were precarious" things, and 
a full meal was something more than a common blessing ! 
when a bellyfull was a windfall," and looked like a special 
providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with 
which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty 
of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, 
existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is 
not otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing of 
food — the act of eating — should have had a particular 
expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from 
that implied and silent gratitude with which we are ex- 
pected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other 
various gifts and good things of existence. 

2 I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty 
other occasions in the course of the day besides my din- 
ner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, 
for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a 
solved problem. Why have none for books, those spirit- 
ual repasts — a grace before Milton — a grace before 
Shakespeare — a devotional exercise proper to be said 
before reading the Fairy Queen? — but the received rit- 
ual having prescribed these forms to the solitary cere- 
money of manducation,° I shall confine my observations to 
the experience which I have had of the grace, properly 
so called ; commending my new scheme for extension to 
a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and per- 

310 



CHARLES LAMB 311 

cliance in part heretical, liturgy," now compiling by my 
friend Homo Humanus,' for the use of a certain snug 
congregation of Utopian'' Rabelaesian' Christians, no 
matter where assembled. 

3 The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its 
beauty at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unpro- 
vocative repast of children. It is here that the grace 
becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent" man, who 
hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day 
or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the 
blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into 
whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could 
never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. The 
proper end of food — the animal sustenance — is barely 
contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his 
daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses 
are perennial." 

4 Again the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded 
by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, 
leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A 
man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of 
plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon 
the ordinance and institution of eating; when he shall 
confess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the pur- 
poses of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. 
When I have sat (a rams Jiospes),* at rich men's tables, 
with the savory soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, 
and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a 



' Literally, a human man. 

^ A name — Utopia — invented by Sir Thomas More, meaning 
noiuhere. 

3 A French satirist Rabelais (Rah'bla) of four centuries ago. 
* An unfrequent guest. 



312 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

distracted choice, I have felt the introduction of that 
ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous or- 
gasm^ upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a 
religious sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mut- 
ter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of 
epicurism" put out the gentle flame of devotion. The in- 
cense which rises round is pagan, and the bellygod inter- 
cepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision 
beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion 
between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his 
gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning 
thanks — for what ? — for having too much, while so 
many starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. 

5 I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce con- 
sciously perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. 
I have seen it in clergymen and others, — a sort of shame, 
— a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which un- 
hallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for 
a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his 
common voice ! helping himself or his neighbor, as if to 
get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that 
the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscien- 
tious in the discharge of the duty ; but he felt in his 
inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the 
viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational 
gratitude. 

6 I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians 
sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without 
remembering the Giver? — no, — I would have them sit 
down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like 
hogs. Or if their appetites must run riot, and they must 

^ huneer. 



CHARLES LAMB 313 

pamper themselves with delicacies for which east and 
west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their 
benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when 
the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the 
grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. 
Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for 
thanksgiving. When Jeshurun' waxed fat, we read that 
he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy-nature better, when he 
put into the mouth of Celaeno' anything but a blessing. 
We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of 
some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a 
meaner and inferior gratitude; but the proper object of 
the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not deli- 
cacies ; the means of life, and not the means of pamper- 
ing the carcass. With what frame or composure, I 
wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction 
at some great Hall-feast, when he knows that his last 
concluding pious word — and that, in all probability, the 
sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal for 
so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, 
with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is tem- 
perance) as those Virgilian fowl ! It is well if the good 
man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, 
those foggy sensuous" steams mingling with and pollut- 
ing the pure altar sacrifice. 
7 The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the 



^Adapted from Deuteronomy 32:15. 

'One of Virgil's harpies, "Virgilian fowl," who foretells dire 
hunger to be endured by the Trojans. Spenser alludes to the 
story : — • 

Whiles sad Celeno, sitting on a clifte, 
A song of bale aud bitter sorrow sings, 
That heart of flint asonder could have rifte." 



314 'ESSAYS OF ELI A 

banquet which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, pro- 
vides for a temptation in the wilderness : — 

A table richly spread in regal mode 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savor; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 

8 The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates° 
would go down without the recommendatory preface of 
a benediction. They are like to be short graces where 
the devil plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his 
usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old 
Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This 
was temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus.^ The whole 
banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompani- 
ments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted 
holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the 
cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple 
wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed 
him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been 
taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished 
Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves ? — 
He dreamed indeed. 

As appetite is wont to dream, 
Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 

But what meats? — 

Him thought,o he by the brook of Cherith stood. 
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 



*A royal Roman gourmand. 

9An idiom like methought—\\. thought, or seemed, to him. 

"Great pity was it, as 'it thought him alia." 

—The Knight es Tale. 



CHARLES LAMB 315 

Food to Elijah bringing even and morn ; 

Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought ; 

He saw the prophet also how he fled 

Into the desnt, and how there he slept 

Under a jumper; then how awaked 

He found his supper on the coals prepared, 

And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 

And ate the second time after repose, 

The strength whereof sufficed him forty days; 

Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, 

Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.'" 



Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate 
dreams of the divine Hungerer. To which of these two 
visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of 
what is called the grace have been the most fitting and 
pertinent? 

9 Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but practically 
I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve 
something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of 
one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, 
which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends 
of preserving and continuing the species. They are fit 
blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becom- 
ing gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious 
reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season 
for that exercise. The Quakers, who go about their busi- 
ness of every description with more calmness than we, 
have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. 
I have always admired their silent grace, and the more be- 
cause I have observed their applications to the meat and 
drink following to be less passionate and sensual than 



10 Hast thou 

At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse? 

Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?" — Emerson. 



3i6 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

ours. Txhey are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a 
people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with 
indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They 
neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen 
in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. ° '* 
10 I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not in- 
different to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of 
deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispas- 
sionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting 
not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in 
higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who pro- 
fesses to like minced veal. There is a physiognomicar 

character in the tastes of food. C holds that a man 

cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. 
I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my 
first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for 
those innocuous" cates. The whole vegetable tribe have 
lost their gust° with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which 
still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient 
and querulous" under culinary" disappointments, as to 
come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting 
some savory mess, and to find one quite tasteless and 
sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest of kitchen 
failures — puts me beside my tenor. The author of The 
Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over 
a favorite food.'" Was this the music quite proper to be 
preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have 
done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the 
blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation? 



" and therefore a token of some religious rite. 

" Macaulay says that Dr. Johnson ate as it was natural that a 
man should eat who, during- a great part of his life, had passed the 
morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. 



CHARLES LAMB 317 

I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin 
face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity 
and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, 
have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should 
be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while 
he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not 
secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon 
— with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen 
before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to 
the banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and 
severer repasts of the Chartreuse ;" to the slender, but 
not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and 
humble man; but at the heaped-up boards of the pam- 
pered and the luxurious they become of dissonant" mood, 
less timid and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the 
noise of those better befitting organs would be which chil- 
dren hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at 
our meals, or are too curious in the study of them or too 
disordered in our application to them, or engross too 
great a portion of these good things (which should be 
common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say 
grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding 
our proportion, is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurk- 
ing sense of this truth is what makes the performance 
of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. 
In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the nap- 
kin, who has not seen that never settled question arise, 
as to zvho shall say it? while the good man of the house 
and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest, belike 
of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be bandy- 
ing about the office between them as a matter of compli- 

'^A monastery. 



■3i8 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

ment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward 
burden of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders ? 

11 I once drank tea In company with two Methodist 
divines of different persuasions/ whom it was my for- 
tune to introduce to each other for the first time that 
evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of 
these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due 
solemnity, whether he chose to say anything. It seems it 
is the custom of some sectaries" to put up a short prayer 
before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at 
first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with 
little less importance he made answer that it was not a 
custom known in his church ; in which courteous evasion 
the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in com- 
pliance with a weak brother, the supplementary or tea- 
grace was waived" altogether. With what spirit might 
not Lucian^* have painted two priests of his religion 
playing into each other's hands the compliment of per- 
forming or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God mean- 
time, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils 
hovering over the two flamens ;° and (as between two 
stools) going away in the end without his supper. 

12 A short form upon these occasions is felt to want rev- 
erence ; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge 
of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigram- 
matic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my 
pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for 
a grace, used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, 
"Is there no clergyman here?" — significantly adding, 
"Thank G — ." Nor do I think our old form at school 
quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald 



"A Roman satirist 



CHARLES LAMB 319 

bread-and-cheese-suppers with a preamble, connecting 
with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the 
most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which 
religion has to ojffer. Non tunc illis erat loctos.^^ I re- 
member we were put to it to reconcile the phrase "good 
creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare 
set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in 
a low and animal sense, — till some one recalled a legend, 
which told how, in the golden days of Christ," the 
young Hospitallers were wont to have smoke-joints of 
roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious 
benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the 
palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, 
and gave us — horresco referens^'^ — trousers instead of 
mutton 



"> It was not the time for such things. 

'^Christ's Hospital. 

" Recalling it, I shudder, 



DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERY 



Children love to listen to stories about their elders, 
when they were children ; to stretch their imagination to 
the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or gran- 
dame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that 
my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear 
about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great 
house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in 
which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — 
so at least it was generally believed in that part of the 
country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately 
become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in 
The Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the 
children and their cruel uncle was tO' be seen fairly carved 
out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the 
whole story down to the Robin Redbreast; till a foolish 
rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of 
modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. 
Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks too 
tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, 
how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field 
was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though 
she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but 
had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she 
might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to 
her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
more fashionable mansion which he had purchased some- 
where in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it 
in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up 
320 



CHARLES LAMB 321 

the dignity of the great house in a sort while she Hved, 
which afterward came to decay, and was nearly pulled 
down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away 
.to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and 
looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away 
the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick 
them up in Lady C/s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here 
John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foolish 
indeed. And then I told how, when she came to die, her 
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and 
some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many 
miles round, to show their respect for her memory, be- 
cause she had been such a good and religious woman ; so 
good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, 
and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little 
Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, up- 
right, graceful person their great-grandmother Field 
once was ; and how in her youth she was esteemed the 
best dancer, — here Alice's little right foot played an in- 
voluntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it de- 
sisted, — the best dancer, I was saying, in the country, 
till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her 
down with pain ; but it could never bend her good spirits, 
or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because 
she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was 
used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great 
lone house ; and how she believed that an apparition of 
two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and 
down the great staircase nfear where she slept, but she 
said " those innocents would do her no harm ; " and how 
frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my 
maid to sleep with mc, because I was never half so good 



322 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

or religious as she, — and yet I never saw the infants. 
Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look 
courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her 
grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holi- 
days, where I in particular used to spend many hours by 
myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve 
Caesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old 
marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned 
into marble with them ; how I never could be tired with 
roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty 
rooms, with, their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, 
and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed 
out, — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, 
which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then 
a solitary gardening man would cross me, — and how the 
nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my 
ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden 
fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more 
pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-look- 
ing yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, 
and fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at, 

— or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine 
garden smells around me, — or basking in the orangery, 
till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with 
the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth, — or 
in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish- 
pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a 
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in 
silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent riskings; 

— I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than 
in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, 
and such-like common baits of children. Here John slyly - 
deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 



'CHARLES LAMB 323 

not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with 
her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the 
present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more height- 
ened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother 
Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial man- 
ner she might be said to love their uncle, John L , 

because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and 
a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping about in 
solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the 
most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp 
no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half 
over the country in a morning, and join the hunters when 
there were any out, — and yet he loved the old great house 
and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always 
pent up within their boundaries, — and how their uncle 
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, 
to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grand- 
mother Field most especially ; and how he used to carry 
me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy — for 
he was a good bit older than me — many a mile when 
I could not walk for pain ; — and how in after-life he 
became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) 
make allowances enough for him when he was impatient 
and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate 
he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how 
when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it 
seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a dis- 
tance there is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore 
his death, as I thought pretty well at first, but afterward 
it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or 
take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have 
done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and 
knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed 



324 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him 
to be ahve again, to be quarreling with him (for we quar- 
reled sometimes), rather than not have him again, 
and was as uneasy without him, as he their poor 
uncle must have been when the doctor took off his 
limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their 
little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle 
John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on 
about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about 
their pretty dead mother. Then I told how, for seven 
long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet 
persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W — n; and, as 
much as children could understand, I explained to them 
what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens, 
— when suddenly turning to Alicfc, the soul of the first 
Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reaUty of re- 
presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood 
before me, or whose that bright hair was ; and while I 
stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter 
to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at 
last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost 
distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed 
upon me the effects of speech : " We are not of Alice 
nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of 
Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than 
nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have 
been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe mil- 
lions of ages before we have existence, and a name ; " 

and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly 

seated in my bachelor armchair, where I had fallen asleep, 
with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side, — but 
John L.( or James Elia) was gone forever. 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 



1 Every man hath two birthdays: two at least in every 
year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as 
it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in 
an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desue- 
tude" of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our 
proper birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to 
children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor 
understanding anything in it beyond cake and orange. 
But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide 
to be pretermitted" by king or cobbler. No one ever re- 
garded the first of January with indifference. It is that 
from which all date their time and count upon what is 
left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. 

2 Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bor- 
dering upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the 
peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it with- 
out a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all 
the images that have been diffused" over the past twelve- 
month; all I have done or suffered, performed or neg- 
lected — in that regretted time. I begin to know its 
worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; 
nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary," when he 
exclaimed, — 

I saw the skirts of the departing year. 

3 It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of 
us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. 
I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; 
though some of my companions affected rather to mani- 

325 



32 6 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

fest an exhilaration" at the birth of the coming year, 
than any tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. 
But I am none of those who — 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 

4 I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties, new 
books, new faces, new years — from some mental twist 
which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I 
have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in 
the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into 
foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pellmell 
with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against 
old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, 
old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the game- 
sters phrase it, games for which I once paid so dear. I 
would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents 
and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter 
them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven 
of my goldenest° years, when I was thrair to the fair 
hair, the fairer eyes of Alice W — n, than that so passion- 
ate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that 
our family should have missed that legacy, which old 
Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this 
moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without 
the idea of that specious" old rogue. 

5 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look 
back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, 
when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty 
years, a man may have leave to love himself, without 
the imputation of self-love. 

6 If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is in- 
trospective — and mine is painfully so — can have a less 



CHARLES LAMB 327 

respect for his present identity, than I have for the man 
EHa. I know him to be hght, and vain, and humorsome ; 
a notorious . . . ; addicted to ... ; averse from counsel, 
neither taking it nor offering it ; — ... besides ; a stam- 
mering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare not ; 
I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou canst be 
willing to lay at his door — but for the child Elia, that 
" other me," there, in the background — I must take leave 
to cherish the remembrance of that young master — with 
as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of 
five-and forty, as if it had been a child of some other 
house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient 
smallpox at five, and rougher medicaments." I can lay 
its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and 
wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal 
tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched 
its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least color 
of falsehood, God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! 
— Tliou art sophisticated ^ — I know how honest, how 
courageous (for a weakling) it was — how religious, 
how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what have I not 
fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, — and 
not some dissembling ° guardian, presenting a false iden- 
tity, to give the rule to my unpracticed steps, and regulate 
the tone of my moral being! 

7 That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sym- 
pathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of 
some sickly idiosyncrasy." Or is it owing to another 
cause : simply, that being without wife on family, I have 



^ " Ha ! here's three on's are sophisticated ! 
Thou art the thing itself." 

— Lear, Act III, Scene 4. 



328 ESSAYS OF ELM 

not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and 
having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back 
upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir 
and favorite? If these speculations seem fantastical to 
thee, reader — (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of 
the way of thy sympathy and am singularly conceited 
only, I retire impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom 
cloud of Elia. 

8 The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a 
character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of 
any old institution ; and the ringing out of the Old Year 
was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar cere- 
mony. — In those days the sound of those midnight 
chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around 
me, never failed to bring a train of pensive" imagery 
into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it 
meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. 
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never 
feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, 
and, if need were, he could preach a homily° on the frag- 
ility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any 
more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imag- 
ination the freezing days of December.^ But now, shall 
I confess a truth ? — I feel these audits" but too power- 
fully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, 
and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and short- 
est periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the 
years both lessen and shorten, I set more count" upon 



^ " O, who can hold a fire in his hand 
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? 
Or wallow naked in December snow 
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?" 

,— Richard II., Act I, Scene $, 



CHARLES LAMB 329 

their periods," and would fain lay my ineffectual finger 
upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to 
pass away " like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors" 
solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable" draught of 
mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that 
smoothly bears human life to eternity ; and reluct" at the 
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green 
earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable 
rural solitudes ; and the sweet security of streets. I would 
set up my tabei^nacle here. I am content to stand still at 
the edge to which I am arrived ; I and my friends ; to be 
no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to 
be weaned by age ; or drop,^ like mellow fruit, as they 
say into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of 
mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes" 
me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and 
are not rooted up without blood.* They do not willingly 
seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. 

9 Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and sum- 
mer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the deli- 
cious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and 
the cheerful glass, and candlelight, and fireside conver- 
sations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself 
— do these things go out with life ? 

10 Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when 
you are pleasant with him? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I 



' " So mayst thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop 
Into thy mother's lap ; or be with ease 
Gathered, not harshly plucked." 

— Milton, Paradise Lost, XI, 531. 
•Remember an experience of Virgil's hero, £neid, Book III, 
line 28, 



330 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

part with the intense deHght of having you (huge arm- 
fuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if 
it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, 
and no longer by this familiar process of reading? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling 
indications which point me to them here, — the recog- 
nizable face — the "sweet assurance of a look" — ?^ 
II In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying — 
to give it its mildest name — does more especially haunt 
and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a swelter- 
ing sky, death is almost problematic." At those times do 
such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then 
we expand and bourgeon."" Then we are as strong again, 
as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. 
The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts 
of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon 
that master-f eeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; 
moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appear- 
ances, — that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sis- 
ter, like that innutritions^ one denounced in the Canticles : 
— I am none of her minions" — I hold with the Persian.* 



^ By comparing the last words of this paragraph with note 54 
in Adonais, the reader will see another specimen of free-and-easy 
quoting. 

° " Heaven sepd it happy dew. 
Earth lend it sap anew, 
Gayly to bourgeon and broadly to grow." 

— The Lady of the Lake. 
' See The Song of Solomon, VIII, 8. 
'A sun-worshiper. 




EDMUND BURKE 



356 



EDMUND BURKE. 
1729-1797. 

When the word "orator" or "oratory" is pronounced 
in the hearing of people who speak and read the EngHsh 
language, the name at the head of this note is likely to 
be the first one to come before the mind's eye. 

" Tihe only Englishmen who stand in a class with 

Webster are Burke, the most philosophic of orators and 

statesmen, and Fox, who of all the characters of history, 

is one of the most easily loved. 

* * * 

" On the whole, I think it safe to say that Webster is 
not surpassed by Burke, and if he is equaled by any 
other English-speaking orator he is equaled by Burke 
alone. 

" The glowing oratory of Edmund Burke will live 
until sensibility to beauty and the generous love of liberty 
shall die." — Sentences from the Hon. Samuel W. Mc- 
Call's " Webster Centennial Oration," September, 1901. 

In Macaulay's second essay on Chatham, speaking of 
the bill for the repeal of the Stamp Act, the writer says : 
" Two great orators and statesmen, belonging to two 
different generations, repeatedly put forth all their 
powers in defense of the bill. The House of Commons 
heard Pitt for the last time, and Burke for the first 
time, and was in doubt to which of them the palm of 
eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid 
sunset and a splendid dawn." Pitt, having become Lord 
Chatham, passed into the Upper House. 

In the same charming piece of historical writing, 

357 



358 EDMUND BURKE 

Macaulay makes the confident prediction : " These sounid 
doctrines were, during a long course of years, inculcated 
by Burke, in orations, some of which will last as long 
as the English language." 

The great speeches here alluded to are surely the 
one on American Taxation and that on Conciliation zvith 
America, discourses which formi a part of every even 
moderately liberal course of reading in American his- 
tory, and their right to be there is absolutely incon- 
testable. 

If, happily, a love of Burke be the result of these 
studies, — and what better thing could happen to the 
reader ? — he will not need urging to proceed to the enjoy- 
ment of other treasures of which Burke left humanity 
heir, some of the greatest of which sprang from Eng- 
lish conquest and control in India, and from that awful 
historic storm, the French Revolution. 

Burke wrote a book upon the Sublime and Beautiful, 
characterized by fine esthetic taste, lofty imagination, 
and eloquent utterance. 

After- Burke had retired from public life, the king 
conferred a pension upon him which was made the 
occasion for a torrent of abuse from his enemies. His 
defense seems to stand alone in its type of literature 
and biography. It is A Letter to a Noble Lord. 



A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 



I My Lord : I could hardly flatter myself with the hope 
that so very early in the season I should have to acknowl- 
edge obligations to the Duke of Bedford and to the Earl 
of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time 
in conferring upon me that sort of honor which it is alone 
within their competence, and which it is certainly most 
congenial to their natures and their manners, to bestow. 

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, 
by the zealots of the new sect in philosophy and politics, 
of which these noble persons think so charitably, and of 
which others think so justly, to me is no matter of 
uneasiness or surprise. To have incurred the displeasure 
of the Duke of Orleans,- or the Duke of Bedford, to fall 
under the censure of Citizen Brissot,^ or of his friend the 
Earl of Lauderdale, I ought to consider as proofs, not the 
least satisfactory, that I have produced some parts of the 
effect I proposed by my endeavors. I have labored hard 
to earn what the noble lords are generous enough to pay. 
Personal offense I have given them none. The part they 
take against me is from zeal to the cause. It is well ! — it 
is perfectly well ! I have to do homage to their justice. 
I have to thank the Bedfords and the Lauderdales for 
having so faithfully and so fully acquitted toward me 



* Earl Fitzwilliam, nephew of Rockingham, head of the min- 
istry of which Burke was a member. 

* Prominent French revolutionists. Note the coupling of their 
names with the two Britons who are excoriated in this letter. 

359 



360 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

whatever arrear of debt was left undischarged by the 
Priestleys ^ and the Paines.' 

2 Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own 
wrong; I, at least, have nothing to complain of. They 
have gone beyond the demands of justice. They have been 
(a little, perhaps, beyond their intention) favorable to 
me. They have been the means of bringing out by their 
invectives the handsome things which Lord Grenville * 
has had the goodness and condescension to say in my 
behalf. Retired as I am from the world, and from all 
its affairs and all its pleasures, I confess it does kindle 
in my nearly extinguished feelings a very vivid satis- 
faction to be so attacked and so commended. It is sooth- 
ing to my wounded mind to be commended by an able, 
vigorous, and well-informed statesman, and at the very 
moment when he stands forth, with a manliness and reso- 
lution worthy of himself and of his cause, for the preser- 
vation of the person and government of our sovereign, 
and therein for the security of the laws, the liberties, the 
morals, and the lives of his people. To be in any fair 
way connected with such things is indeed a distinction. 
No philosophy can make me above it ; no melancholy can 
depress me so low as to make me wholly insensible to 
such an honor. Why will they not let me remain in 
obscurity and inaction? Are they apprehensive, that, if 
an atom of me remains, the sect has something to fear? 
Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca's,^ my 



" Englishmen who had written against Burke. All Americans 
know Thomas Paine. 

* A distinguished statesman, a cousin of William Pitt ; at that 
time in the House of Lords he replied to the Duke of Bedford in 
Burke's defence. 

° A military hero of Bohemia in the fourteenth century. 



'EDMUND BURKE 361 

skin might be made into a drum, to animate Europe to 
eternal battle against a tyranny that threatens to over- 
whelm all Europe and all the human race ? 
3 My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before 
this of France, the annals of all time have not furnished 
an instance of a complete revolution. That revolution 
seems to have extended even to the constitution of the 
mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it 
resembles what Lord Verulam ^ says of the operations of 
nature : It was perfect, not only in all its elements and 
principles, but in all its members and its organs from the 
very beginning. The moral scheme of France furnishes 
the only pattern ever known, which they who admire will 
instantly resemble. It is indeed an inexhaustible reper- 
tory of one kind of examples. In my wretched condition, 
though hardly to be classed with the living, I am not safe 
from them. They have tigers to fall upon animated 
strength. They have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The 
national menagerie is collected by the first physiologists 
of the time; and it is defective in no description of 
savage nature. They pursue, even such as me, into the 
obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolution- 
ary tribunals. Neither sex, nor age — nor the sanctuary 
of the tomb is sacred to them. They have so determined 
a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to 
the departed, the sad immunities" of the grave. They are 
not wholly without an object. Their turpitude" purveys" 
to their malice ; and they unplumb '' the dead for bullets 
to assassinate the living. If all revolutionists were not 
proof against all caution, I should recommend it to their 

• Francis Bacon. 

' thrust them from their lead coffins. 



362 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

consideration, that no persons were ever known in history, 
either sacred^ or profane,** to vex the sepiilcher, and by 
their sorceries, to call up the prophetic dead, with any 
other event,"* than the prediction of their own disastrous 
fate. — " Leave me, oh leave me to repose ! " 
4 In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his 
attack upon me and my mortuary ° pension : He cannot 
readily comprehend ^^ the transaction he condemns. What 
I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the produc- 
tion of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect 
of no solicitation. The first suggestion oi it never came 
from me, mediately or immediately, to his majesty or any 
of his ministers. It was long known that the instant my 
engagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of 
all calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity and 
sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed 
that design. I was entirely out of the way of serving or 
of hurting any statesman or any party, when the ministers 
so generously and so nobly carried into effect the spon- 
taneous bounty of the crown. Both descriptions have 
acted as became them. When I could no longer serve 
them, the ministers have considered my situation. When 
I could no longer hurt them, the revolutionists have 
trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal 
to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It 
came to me, indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of 
mind and body, in which no circumstance of fortune could 



^as Saul. I Samuel 28:19; 31:4. 

"as Macbeth, Act IV, Scene i. 

" result. 

""What evil thing have I done that such men praise me?" I 
am a party to a good honest transaction ; how can such a man under- 
stand it? 



EDMUND BURKE 363 

afford me any real pleasure. But this was no fault in the 
royal donor ^- or in his ministers, who were pleased, in 
acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the 
public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man. 

5 It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would 
as ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the 
value of a long life, spent with unexampled toil in the 
service of my country. Since the total body of my 
services, on account of the industry which was shown in 
them, and the fairness of my intentions, have obtained 
iht acceptance of my sovereign, it would be absurd in me 
to range myself on the side of the Duke of Bedford and 
the corresponding society, or, as far as in me lies, to 
permit a dispute on the rate at which the authority 
appointed by our constitution to estimate such things, has 
been pleased to set them. 

6 Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and con- 
tempt. By me they have been so always. I knew that 
as long as I remained in public, I should live down the 
calumnies of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If 
I happened to be now and then in the wrong, as who is 
not, like all other men, I must bear the consequence of 
my faults and my mistakes. The libels of the present day, 
are just of the same stuff as the libels of the past. But 
they derive an importance from the rank of the persons 
they come from, and the gravity of the place ^^ where 
they were uttered. In some way or other I ought to take 
some notice of them. To assert myself thus traduced is 
not vanity or arrogance. It is a demand of justice; it is 
a demonstration of gratitude. If I am unworthy, the 

" George III. 

" The House of Lords. 



364 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

ministers are worse than prodigal. On that hypothesis, 
I perfectly agree with the Duke of Bedford. 

7 For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put 
myself on my country. I ought to be allowed a reason- 
able freedom, because I stand upon my deliverance ; and 
no culprit ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmost 
latitude of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possi- 
ble decorum. Whatever it may be in the eyes of these 
noble persons themselves, to me their situation calls for 
the most profound respect. If I should happen to tres- 
pass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always be 
supposed that a confusion of characters may produce 
mistakes ; that, in the masquerades of the grand carnival 
of our age, whimsical adventures happen, odd things are 
said and pass off. If I should fail a single point in the 
high respect I owe to those illustrious persons, I cannot 
be supposed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl 
of Lauderdale of the House of Peers, but the Duke of 
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of Palace Yard ^* — 
the Dukes and Earls of Brentford,^^ There they are on 
the pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my 
humble level, and, virtually at least, to have waived their 
high privilege. 

8 Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary 
tribunals, where men have been put to death for no 
other reason than that they had obtained favors from the 
crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old 
English law — that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline 
his Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the 
Duke of Bedford, as a juror, to pass upon the value of 

" A place where many Englishmen had been put to death. 
"Actors in a play. 



EDMUND BURKE 365 

my services. Whatever his natural parts may be, I 
cannot recognize in his few and idle years ^'^ the compe- 
tence to judge of my long and laborious life. If I can 
help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my quantum 
meruit}'' Poor rich man ! he can hardly know anything 
of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate its com- 
pensations when its work is done. I have no doubt of 
his Grace's readiness in all the calculations of vulgar 
arithmetic; but I shrewdly suspect that he is very little 
studied in the theory of moral proportions, and has never 
learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and 
state. 

9 His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, 
that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such 
as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; 
and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward 
them. Between money and such services, if done by abler 
men than I am, there is no common principle of com- 
parison : they are quantities incommensurable.^^ Money 
is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. 
It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, 
indeed, sustain, but never can inspire. With submission 
to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As 
to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ as well 
as he a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a 
more confined application, I certainly stand in need of 
every kind of relief and easement" much more than he 
does. When I say I have not received more than I 
deserve — is this the language I hold to Majesty ? No ! 

"The Duke was thirty years old. 

" How much he has merited — my deserts. 

" They have no common unit of measure. 



366 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

Far, very far, from it! Before that presence I claim no 
merit at all. Everything toward me is favor and bounty. 
One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud 
and insulting foe. 

10 His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt, by charg- 
ing my acceptance of his Majesty's grant as a departure 
from my ideas, and the spirit of my conduct with regard 
to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy were false 
and ill founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's 
ideas of economy I have contradicted, and not my own. 
If he means to allude to certain bills brought in by me 
on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him, that 
there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either 
the letter or the spirit of those acts. Does he mean the 
pay-office act? I take it for granted he does not. The 
act to which he alludes is, I suppose, the establishment 
act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has never read 
the one or the other. The first of these systems cost 
me, with every assistance which my then situation gave 
me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common 
*hrough all the offices, and general in the public at large, 
that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize 
the office of paymaster-general. I undertook it, however, 
and I succeeded in my undertaking. Whether the mili- 
tary service, or whether the general economy of our 
finances have profited by that act, I leave to those who 
are acquainted with the army, and with the treasury, to 
judge. 

11 An opinion full as general prevailed also at the same 
time, that nothing could be done for the regulation of 
the civil-list establishment. The very attempt to intro- 
duce method into it, and any limitations to its services, 



EDMUND BURKE 367 

was held absurd. I had not seen the man, who so much 
as suggested one economical principle, or an economical 
expedient, upon that subject. Nothing but coarse ampu- 
tation, or coarser taxation, were ^^ then talked of, both of 
them without design, combination, or the least shadow 
of principle. Blind and headlong zeal, or factious fury, 
were ^^ the whole contribution brought by the most noisy 
on the occasion, toward the satisfaction of the public, 
or" the relief of the crown. 

12 Let me tell my youthful censor that the necessities of 
that time required something very different from what 
others then suggested, or what his Grace now conceives. 
Let me inform him that it was one of the most critical 
periods in our annals. 

13 Astronomers have supposed that, if a certain comet, 
whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in 
some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us 
along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what 
regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of 
the Rights of Man (which " from its horrid hair shakes 
pestilence and war," and " with fear of change perplexes 
monarchs"), had that comet crossed upon us in that 
internal state of England, nothing human could have 
prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the high- 
way of heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and 
miseries of the French Revolution. 

14 Happily, France was not then Jacobinized.^** Her 
hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off, 
but we preserved the body ; we lost our colonies,'^ but we 



" Was would be better. 

^ Turned against all established order. 

^^ American. 



368 A LETTER TO A XOBLE LORD 

kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much intes- 
tine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and 
savage insurrection -- quitted the woods, and prowled 
about our streets in the name of Reform. Such was the 
distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, 
in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not 
coimt upon numbers to support his principles and execute 
his designs. 

15 Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called 
Parliamentan." Reforms, went, not in the intention of all 
the professors and supporters of them, imdoubtedly, but 
went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote 
effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution 
of this kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but 
England, would have had the honor of leading up the 
death-dance of democratic revolution. Other projects, 
exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the ver)' 
existence of the kingdom imder any Constitution. There 
are who remember the blind fun.- of some, and the lamen- 
table helplessness of others ; here, a torpid confusion, 
from a panic fear of the danger — there, the same inac- 
tion, from a stupid insensibilit)* to it ; here, well-wishers 
to the mischief — there, indifferent lookers on. At the 
same time, a sort of National Convention, dubious in its 
nature, and perilous in its example, nosed Parliament in 
the ven,' seat of its authorit)-, sat with a sort of superin- 
tendence over it, and little less than dictated to it, not 
only laws, but the ven»- form and essence of legislature 
itself. In Ireland things ran in a still more eccentric 
course. Government was unnerved, confounded, and in 
a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. 

° Lord George Gordon's riots. 



EDMUXD BURKE 369 

I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North." 
He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, 
of a versatile' understanding fitted for ever}- sort of 
business, of infinite "* wit and pleasantry-, of a delightful 
temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. 
But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak adula- 
tion, and not to honor the memon.- of a great man, to 
deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and 
spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, a 
darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over 
the whole region. For a little time the helm appeared 
abandoned. 

Ipse diem noctemque negat discemere coelo, 
Xec meminisse viae media Palinurus"' in unda. 

16 At that time I was connected with men of high place 
in the community." They loved liberty" as much as the 
Duke of Bedford can do : and they understood it at least 
as well. Perhaps their politics, as usual, took the tincture 
from their character, and they cultivated what they loved. 
The liberty they pursued was a Uberty inseparable from 
order, from virtue, from morals, and from rehgion. and 
was neither h}-pocritically nor fanatically followed. They 
did not wish that libert\-,'' in itself one of the first of 
blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest 
curse which could fall upon mankind. To preserve the 



" Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782. 

•* "Alas, poor Yorick! — a fellow of infinite jest, of most ex- 
cellent fancy." — Hamlet. 

" Pilot of the Trojan fleet. 

"Palinurus declared that he was not able to distinguish day 
and night, nor to remember his course over the sea." 

** Fox. Lord Rockingham. Lord Shelbume. 

" Unlike them of whom Milton in one of his sonnets said: 
"License they mean when they cry liberty." 



370 'A LETTER TO A NOIBLE LORD. 

Constitution"' entire, and practically equal to all the 
great ends of its formation, not in one single part, but 
in all its parts, was to them the first object. Popularity 
and power they regarded alike. These were with them 
only different means of obtaining that object, and had 
no preference over each other in their minds, but as 
one or the other might afford a surer or a less certain 
prospect of arriving at that end. It is some consolation 
to me, in the cheerless gloom which darkens the evening 
of my life, that with them I commenced my political 
career, and never for a moment, in reality nor in appear- 
ance, for any length of time, was separated from their 
good wishes and good opinion. 

17 By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, 
but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy° 
which ever has pursued me with a full cry through life, I 
had obtained a very considerable degree of public confi- 
dence, I know well enough how equivocal a test this 
kind of popular opinion forms of the merit that obtained 
it. I am no stranger to the insecurity of its tenure. I 
do not boast of it. It is mentioned to show, not how 
highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use 
I made of it. I endeavored to turn that short-lived advan- 
tage to myself, into a permanent benefit to my country. 
Far am I from detracting from the merit of some gentle- 
men, out of office or in it, on that occasion. No ! it is 
not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice 
to the aids that I receive. I have through life been 
willing to give everything to others, and to reserve noth- 
ing for myself but the inward conscience that I had 
omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to discipline, to 

"^ Has Great Britain a written constitution? 



EDMUND BURKE 371 

direct the abilities of the country for its service, and to 
place them in the best hght to improve their age, or to 
adorn it. This conscience° I have. I have never sup- 
pressed any man, never checked him for a moment in his 
course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I was always 
ready, to the height of my means (and they were always 
infinitely below my desires), to forward those abilities 
which overpowered my own. He is an ill-furnished un- 
dertaker"' who has no machinery but his own hands to 
work with. Poor in my own facilities, I ever thought 
myself rich in theirs. In that period of difficulty and 
danger, more especially, I consulted and sincerely co- 
operated with men of all parties, who seemed disposed 
to the same ends, or to any main part of them. Nothing 
to prevent disorder was omitted : when it appeared, 
nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexe- 
cuted, as far as I could prevail. At the time I speak of, 
and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encour- 
aged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand — I 
do not say I saved my country ; I am sure I did my 
country important service. There were few, indeed, that 
did not at that time acknowledge it; and that time was 
thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that no man in 
the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision 
should be made for him. 

18 So much for my general conduct through the whole 
of the portentous crisis from' 1780 to 1782, and the gen- 
eral sense then entertained of that conduct by my country. 
But my character, as a reformer, in the particular in- 
stances which the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so con- 
nected in principle with my opinions on the hideous 



■• Not a "funeral director. 



372 "A LETTER TO A NOSLE LORD. 

changes, which have since barbarized France, and spread- 
ing thence, threaten the pohtical and moral order of the 
whole world, that it seems to demand something of a 
more detailed discussion. 

19 My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may 
think, the suppression of a paltry pension or employment, 
more or less. Economy in my plan was, as it ought to 
be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental. I acted on 
state principles. I found a great distemper in the com- 
monwealth; and, according to tlie nature of the evil and 
of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep ; it was 
complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. 
Throughout it was full of contra-indicants.° On one 
hand government, daily growing more invidious^ from an 
apparent increase of the means of strength, was every 
day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor 
was this dissolution confined to government° commonly 
so called. It extended to Parliament; which was losing 
not a little in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of 
its not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the 
desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused 
into them by art), appeared in so wild and inconsiderate 
a manner, with regard to the economical object (for I set 
aside for a moment the dreadful tampering with the body 
of the constitution itself) that if their petitions had liter- 
ally been complied with, the state would have been con- 
vulsed; and a gate would have been opened, through 
which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Noth- 
ing could have spared the public from the mischiefs cri 
the false reform but its absurdity ; which would soon 
have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into dis- 
credit. This would have left a rankling wound in the 



^EDMUND BURKE '373 

hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in 
the accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest 
of mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to any- 
, thing rather than to their own proceedings. But there 
were then persons in the world, who nourished complaint ; 
and would have been thoroughly disappointed if the 
people were ever satisfied. I was not of that humor. I 
wished that they should be satisfied.'" It was my aim to 
give to the people the substance of what I knew they de- 
sired, and what I thought was right whether they desired 
it or not, before it had been modified for them into sense- 
less petitions. I knew that there is a manifest marked 
distinction which ill men, with ill designs, or weak men 
incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, 
that is, a marked distinction between change and reforma- 
tion. The former alters the substance of the objects 
themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as 
well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change 
is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the 
effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not con- 
tradict the very principle upon which reformation is 
desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform 
is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary 
modification of the object, but a direct application of a 
remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that 
is removed, all is sure. It stops there ; and if it fails, the 
substance which underwent the operation, at the very 
worst, is but where it was. 

20 All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said 
elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated, 

^""Tell him (Anthony), so please him come unto this place. 
He shall be satisfied."— 5r«/uj. 



374 ^ LETTER TO 'A NOBLE LORB. 

line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into 
the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform. 
The French revolutionists complained of everything ; they 
refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, 
nothing at all, unchanged. The consequences are before 
us, not in remote history, not in future prognostication: 
they are about us, they are upon us. They shake the 
public security; they menace private enjoyment. They 
dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of 
the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us 
in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business 
,is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are 
saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, 
and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance by the 
enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The revolu- 
tion harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or 
from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally 
"all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adul- 
terously lay their eggs, and brood " over, and hatch " 
them in the nest of every neighboring state. These ob- 
scene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what 
divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and raven- 
ous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter 
over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and 
leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted 
with the slime of their filthy offal.''' 
21 If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete 
innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, 
in the whole body of its solidity and compound mass, at 



*' The cuckoo lays her eggs in the nest of a smaller bird, to 
whom she leaves the "brooding" and the "hatching." 
^^ Description taken from Virgil's Mneid, Book III. 



EDMUND BURKE 375 

which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows " with 
horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every 
reflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought- 
sick, without a thorough abhorrence of everything they 
say and everything they do, I am amazed at the morbid 
strength or the natural infirmity of his mind, 
22 It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, 
that produced my plan of reform. Without troubling 
myself with the exactness of the logical diagram, I con- 
sidered them as things substantially opposite. It was to 
prevent that evil that I proposed the measures which his 
Grace is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to 
recall to my recollection. I had (what I hope that noble 
Duke will remember in all his operations) a state to pre- 
serve, as well as a state to reform, I had a people to 
gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claim 
half the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from 
being done. In that situation of the public mind, I did 
not undertake, as was then proposed, to new-model the 
House of Commons or the House of Lords, or to change 
the authority under which any officer of the crown acted, 
who was suffered at all to exist. Crown, lords, commons, 
judicial system, system of administration, existed as they 
had existed before, and in the mode and manner in which 
they had always existed. My measures were, what I then 
truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, heal- 
ing and mediatorial. A complaint was made of too much 
influence in the House of Commons : I reduced it in both 
Houses; and I gave my reasons, article by article, for 
eyery reduction, and showed why I thought it safe for 



"With tristful visage, as against the doom." 

— Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4, line 50, 



376 "A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD. 

the service of the state. I heaved the lead '* every inch of 
w^ay I made. A disposition to expense was complained 
of: to that I opposed, not mere retrenchment, but a sys- 
tem of economy, which would make a random expense, 
without plan or foresight, in future, not easily practicable. 
I proceeded upon principles of research to put me in 
possession of my matter ; on principles of method to regu- 
late it ; and on principles in the human mind and in civil 
affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation. I con- 
ceived nothing arbitrarily; nor proposed anything to be 
done by the will and pleasure of others, or my own ; but 
by reason, and by reason only. I have ever abhorred, 
since the first dawn of my understanding to this its ob- 
scure '° twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, in- 
clination, and will, in the affairs of government, where 
only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legis- 
lation and administration, should dictate. Government is 
made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will 
and to caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the 
governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in 
people. 

22, On a careful review, therefore, and analysis, of all the 
component parts of the civil list, and on weighing them 
against each other, in order to make, as much as possible, 
all of them a subject of estimate (the foundation and cor- 
ner-stone of all regular provident economy) it appeared 
to me evident, that this was impracticable, whilst that 
part, called the pension list, was totally discretionary in 
its amount. For this reason, and for this only, I proposed 
to reduce it, both in its gross quantity, and in its larger 



^* A sailor's metaphor. 

^^ Can Burke be in earnest here? 



EDMUND BURKE Z77 

individual proportions, to a certainty : lest, if it were left 
without a general limit, it might eat up the civil list serv- 
ice ; if suffered to be granted in portions too great for the 
fund, it might defeat its own end ; and by unlimited allow- 
ances to some, it might disable the crown in means of pro- 
viding for others. The pension list was to be kept as 
a sacred fund; but it could not be kept as a constant 
open fund, sufificient for growing demands, if some 
demands would wholly devour it. The tenor of the act 
will show that it regarded the civil list only, the reduc- 
tion of which to some sort of estimate was my great 
object. 

24 No other of the crown funds did I meddle with, be- 
cause they had not the same relations. This of the four 
and a half per cent does his Grace imagine had escaped 
me, or had escaped all the men of business, who acted 
with me in those regulations? I knew that such a fund 
existed, and that pensions had been always granted on it, 
before his Grace was born. This fund was fully in my 
eye. It was full in the eyes of those who worked with 
me. It was left on principle. On principle I did what 
was then done; and on principle what was left undone 
was omitted. I did not dare to rob the nation of all 
funds to reward merit. If I pressed this point too close, 
I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which I 
went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me ; but if any 
one thinks it worth his while to know the rules that guided 
me in my plan of reform, he will read my printed speech 
on that subject ; at least what is contained from page 230 
to page 241 in the second volume of the collection which 
a friend has given himself the trouble to make of my 
publications. Be this as it may, these two bills (though 



378 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

achieved with the greatest labor, and management of 
every sort, both within and without the house) were only 
a part, and but a small part, of a very large system, 
comprehending all the objects I stated in opening my 
proposition, and indeed many more, which I just hinted 
at in my speech '* to the electors of Bristol, when I was 
put out of that representation. All these, in some state 
or other of forwardness, I have long by me. 
25 But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds ? 
I think them the least of my services. The time gave 
them an occasional " value. What I have done in the way 
of political economy was far from confined to this body of 
measures. I did not come into Parliament to con my 
lesson. I had earned my pension before I set my foot in 
St. Stephen's Chapel.^' I was prepared and disciplined to 
this political warfare. The first session I sat in Parlia- 
ment, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commer- 
cial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interests of 
Great Britain and its empire. A great deal was then 
done ; and more, far more, would have been done, if 
more had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigor 
of my manhood, my constitution sunk under my labor. 
Had I then died (and I seemed to myself very near 
death), I had then earned for those who belonged to me 
more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are of 
power to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am 
called to account for are not those on which I value my- 
self the most. If I were to call for a reward (which I 
have never done), it should be for those in which, for 



'" One of Burke's greatest orations. 
'^ depending on the occasion. 
** Parliament. 



EDMUND BURKE 



379 



fourteen years without intermission," I showed the most 
industry and had the least success ; I mean in the affairs 
of India. They are those on which I value myself the 
most; most for the importance, most for the labor, most 
for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance 
in the pursuit. Others may value them most for the 
intention. In that, surely, they are not mistaken. 

26 Does his Grace think, that they who advised the crown 
to make my retreat '" easy, considered me only as an econ- 
omist? That, well understood, however is a good deal. 
If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have 
made political economy an object of my humble studies, 
from my very early youth to near the end of my service 
in Parliament, even before (at least to any knowledge of 
mine), it had employed the thoughts of speculative men 
in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its 
infancy in England, where, in the last century, it had 
its origin. Great and learned men thought my studies 
were not wholly thrown away, and deigned to communis 
cate with me now and then on some particulars of their 
immortal works. Something of these studies may appear 
incidentally in some of the earliest things I published. 
The House has been witness to their effect, and haa 
profited of them more or less, for above eight and twenty 
yeaio. To their estimate I leave the matter. 

27 I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and 
rocked, and dandled into a legislator : "Nitor in adver^ 
sum" ■" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not 
one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that 

J" Referring to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and the 
failure to convict. 

*" life in retirement. 

" I struggle against opposition. 



38o ^ LETTER TO 'A NOBLE LORD 

recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. 
I was not made for a minion or a tool. As Httle did I 
follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on 
the understandings of the people. At every step of my 
progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and 
opposed), and at every turnpike'" I met, I was obliged 
to show my passport, and again and again to prove my 
sole title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a 
proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, 
and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at 
home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even, for me. 
I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and 
please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl 
of Lauderdale, to the last gasp '' will I stand. 
28 Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the 
person whom he has not thought it below him to reproach, 
he might have found, that, in the whole course of my 
life, I have never, on any pretense of economy, or any 
other pretense, so much as in a single instance, stood 
between any man and his reward of service or his en- 
couragement in useful talent and pursuit, from the high- 
est of those services and pursuits to the lowest. On the 
contrary, I have on a hundred occasions exerted myself 
with singular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable 
pretensions. I have more than once had good-natured 
reprehensions ° from my friends for carrying the matter 
to something bordering on abuse. This line of conduct, 
whatever its merit might be, was partly owing to natural 



■"" toll-gate. "She now keeps with her husband a turnpike, 
through which I often ride." — Thackeray. 
" "Master, go on, and I will follow thee, 
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty." 

— As You Like It, Act 11, Scene 3. 



'EDMUND BURKE 381 

disposition, but I think full as much to reason and prin- 
ciple. I looked on the consideration of public service or 
public ornament to be real and very justice; and I ever 
held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the 
nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, 
the worst economy in the world. In saving money I soon 
can count up all the good I do; but when by a cold 
penury I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the 
growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond 
all calculation. Whether it be too much or too little, what- 
ever I have done has been general and systematic. I have 
never entered into those trifling vexations, and oppres- 
sive details, that have been falsely and most ridiculously 
laid to my charge. 

29 Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr. 
Dunning between the proposition and execution of my 
plan ? No ! surely, no ! Those pensions were within my 
principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their 
pensions, their titles, — all they had ; and if more they 
had, I should have been but pleased the more. They 
were men of talents ; they were men of service. I put the 
profession of the law out of the question in one of them. 
It is a service that rewards itself. But their public service, 
though, from their abilities unquestionably of more 
value than mine, in its quantity and in its duration 
was not to be mentioned with it. But I never could 
drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any matter 
whatever ; and least of all do I know how to haggle and 
huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none ; 
nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for 
everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for 
everything that was given. I was thus left to support the 



382 'A LETTER TO 'A NOBLE LORD 

grants of a name ^* ever dear to me, and ever venerable to 
the world, in favor of those, who were no friends of mine 
or of his, against the rude attacks of those who were at 
that time friends to the grantees, and their own zealous 
partisans. I have never heard the Earl of . Lauderdale 
complain of these pensions. He finds nothing wrong 
till he comes to me. This is impartiality, in the true mod- 
ern revolutionary style. 

30 Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded 
order and economy, is stable and eternal ; as all principles 
must be. A particular order of things may be altered ; 
order itself cannot lose its value. As to other particulars, 
they are variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of 
regulation are not fundamental laws. The public exigen- 
cies ° are the masters of all such laws. They rule the 
laws, and are not to be ruled by them. They who exercise 
the legislative power at the time must judge. 

31 It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him 
that mere parsimony is not economy. It is separable in 
theory from it ; and in fact it may or it may not be a part 
of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and 
great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. 
If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds 
of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher 
economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, 
not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no 
providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no 
comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not 
an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false 
economy in perfection. The other economy has larger 



** Lord Rockingham. 



EDMUND BURKE 383 

views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a 
firm, sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent 
importunity, onl}^ to open another, and a wider, to unpre- 
suming merit. If none but meritorious service or real 
talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, 
and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all 
the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the 
merit it ever will produce. No state, since the foundation 
of society, has been impoverished by that species of pro- 
fusion. Had the economy of selection and proportion 
been at all times observed, we should not now have had 
an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry 
of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own 
conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or if he pleases, the 
charity *' of the crown. 

32 His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my 
deserts in the far greater part of my conduct in life. It 
is free for him to do so. There will always be some 
difference of opinion in the value of political services. 
But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men 
living, ought to be the last to call in question. I have 
supported with very great zeal, and I am told with some 
degree of success, those opinions, or, if his Grace likes 
another expression better, those old nrejudices, which 
buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and 
titles. I have omitted no exertion to prevent him and 
them from sinking to that level, to which the meretricious ° 
French faction, his Grace at least coquets with, omit no 
exertion to reduce both. I have done all 1 could to dis- 
countenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those 



Why does Burke use the term "charity"? 



384 'A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent 
merit of their own. I have strained every nerve to keep 
the Duke of Bedford in that situation which alone makes 
him my superior. Your lordship has been a witness of 
the use he makes of that pre-eminence. 

33 But be it, that this is virtue ! Be it, that there is virtue 
in this well selected rigor ; yet all virtues are not equally 
becoming to all men and at all times. There are crimes, 
undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our 
existence, ought to put a generous antipathy ° in action : 
crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a 
warm and animated pursuit. But all things, that concern, 
what I may call, the preventive police of morality, all 
things merely rigid, harsh and censorial,® the antiquated 
moralists, at whose feet I was brought up, would not 
have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite 
virtues of young men of rank. What might have been 
well enough, and have been received with a veneration 
mixed with awe and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed 
Cato," would have wanted something of propriety in the 
young Scipios," the ornament of the Roman nobility, in 
the flower of their life. But the times, the morals, the 
masters, the scholars have all undergone a thorough 
revolution. It is a vile illiberal school, this new French 
academy of sans culottes.*^ There is nothing in it that is 
fit for a gentleman to learn. 

34 Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself, that 

** Eminent Roman statesman, soldier, and writer. Cicero 
makes him one of the personages who talk in his great essay, 
Cato Maior De Sencchitc, The Elder Cato on Old Age. 

*' Men like Scipio. Cicero points to the younger Africanus 
as the ideal statesman. He makes him; also a speaker in De 
Senectute. 

*" without short breeches, — applied to the Paris rabble gener- 
ally. 



EDMUND BURKE 385 

the parents of the growing generation will be satisfied 
with what is to be taught to their children in Westminster, 
in Eton, or in Winchester: I still indulge the hope that 
no groum gentleman or nobleman of our time will think 
of finishing at Mr. Thelwall's lecture *" whatever may 
have been left incomplete at the old universities of his 
country. I would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt 
for a motto what was said of a Roman censor or praetor 
(or what was he), who in virtue of a Scnatiis consultiim 
shut up certain academies, 

"Cludere ludum impudentiae jussit." ^'' 

Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will 
rejoice at the breaking up for the holidays, and will pray 
that there may be very long vacations in all such schools. 

35 The awful state of the time, and not myself or my own 
justification, is my true object in what I now write; or in 
what I shall ever write or say. It little signifies to the 
world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the 
Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is 
nothing more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily 
perceive, to convey my sentiments on matters far more 
worthy of your attention. It is when I stick to my 
apparent first subject that I ought to apologize, not when 
I depart from it. I therefore must beg your Lordship's 
pardon for again resuming it after this very short digres- 
sion ; assuring you that I shall never altogether lose 
sight of such matter as persons abler than I am may turn 
to some profit. 

36 The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to 



*' lectureship, the office or the school of a lecturer. 
"^ "He commanded to close the school of impudence." 



386 'A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

call the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty's 
grant to me, which he considers as excessive and out of 
all bounds. 

37 I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, 
that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered 
censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer " 
nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as 
dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced 
and incongruously ° put together, his Grace preserved his 
idea of reproach to me, but took the subject matter from 
the crown grants to his oimi family. This is ''the stuff of 
which his dreams are made." '" In that way of putting 
things together his Grace is perfectly in the right. The 
grants to the house of Russell were so enormous as not 
only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. 
The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the 
creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy 
bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. 
Huge as he is, and whilst " he lies floating many a 
rood," "' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his 
whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles° through which 
he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers 
me all over with the spray, everything of him and about 
him is from the throne. Is it for hhn to question the dis- 
pensation of the royal favor? 



" So Horace said. 

'"' Adapted from Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams 
are made on." 

°' Milton's Satan:— 

"Prone on the flood, extended long and large, 
Lay floating many a rood." 

— Paradise Lost, Book I, line 195. 



EDM UND B URKE 387 

38 I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel be- 
tween the public merits of his Grace, by which he justities 
the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the 
favorable construction of which I have obtained what his 
Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at 
all the honor of acquaintance with the noble Duke ; but I 
ought to presume, — and it costs me nothing to do so, — 
that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all 
who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, 
it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself, 
in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, 
or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a 
parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful 
to my country. It would not be gross adulation but un- 
civil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own 
to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast 
landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they 
are, are original and personal: his are derivative. It is 
his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this 
inexhaustible fund of merit which makes his Grace so 
very delicate and exceptions about the merit of all other 
grantees. of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain 
in quiet, I should have said, " 'Tis his estate : that's 
enough. It is his by law : what have I to do with it or 
its history?" He would naturally have said, on his side, 
*' 'Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my an- 
cestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a 
young man with very old pensions ;' he is an old man with 
very young pensions — that's all." 

39 Will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly 
to compare my little merit with that which obtained from 
the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which 



388 ^A LETTER T0\ A NOBLE LORD. 

he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious 
individuals? I would willingly leave him to the herald's 
college, which the philosophy of the sans culottes will 
abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians, re- 
corders, and blazoners of virtues and arms, differ wholly 
from that other description of historians, who never as- 
sign any act of politicians to a good motive. These gentle 
historians, on the contrary, dip their pens in nothing but 
the milk of human kindness,"* They seek no further for 
merit than the preamble''^ of a patent, or the inscription 
on a tomb. With them every man created a peer is first 
an hero ready made. They judge of every man's capacity 
for office by the offices he has filled ; and the more offices 
the more ability. Every general officer with them is a 
Marlborough ;°' every statesman a Burleigh ;" every judge 
a Murray ^* or a Yorke. They, who alive, were laughed 
at or pitied by all their acquaintance, make as good a fig- 
ure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim,^" Edmon- 
son, and Collins. To these recorders, so full of good na- 
ture to the great and prosperous, I would willingly 
leave the first Baron Russell, and Earl of Bedford, and 



** "Yet I do fear thy nature; 

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness 
To catch the nearest way." 

— Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5, lines 14-16. 

"" Did not Burke justify the Americans for going to war for 
a "preamble"? Of a different complexion, however. 

*° The great Captain General of the English forces — the victor 
at Blenheim. 

"' Robert Cecil, "the one minister in whom Queen Elizabeth 
really confided." — Green. 

°* Justice Lord Mansfield.— "How sweet an Ovid was in Mur- 
ray lost !" 

'» Writers in Heraldry. 



EDMUND BURKE ■ 389 

the merits of his grants. But the aulnager/" the weigher, 
the meter of grants, will not suffer us to acquiesce in the 
judgment of the prince reigning at the time when they 
were made. They are never good to those who earn them. 
Well then; since the new grantees have war made on 
them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not 
to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which 
great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the 
heroic origin of their house. 

40 The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the 
grants, was a Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentle- 
man's family, raised by being a minion of Henry the 
Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of char- 
acter to create these relations, the favorite was in all likeli- 
hood much, such another as his master. The first of those 
immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient de- 
mesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of 
the ancient nobility of the land. The lion, having sucked 
the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the 
jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of con- 
fiscation, the favorites became fierce and ravenous. This 
worthy favorite's first grant was from the lay nobility. 
The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the 
first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth, his 
Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant 
like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind, so 
different from his own. 

41 Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign ; his 
from Henry the Eighth. 

42 Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent 
person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body 

•" Measurer by the ell. 



390 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

of unoffending men."' His grants were from the aggre- 
gate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously 
legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by 
the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. 

43 The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was 
that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a level- 
ing tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, 
but who fell with particular fury on everything that was 
great and noble. Mine has been in endeavoring to screen 
every man, in every class, from oppression, and particu- 
larly in defending the high and eminent, who^ in "the bad 
times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief govern- 
ors, or confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed 
to jealousy, avarice, and envy. 

44 The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pen- 
sion was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking 
the spoil, with a prince who plundered a part of the 
national church of his time and country. Mine was in 
defending the whole of the national church of my own 
time and my own country, and the whole of the national 
churches of all countries, from the principles and the 
examples, which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a 
contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of 
all property, and thence to universal desolation. 

45 The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in 
being a favorite and chief adviser to a prince who left no 
liberty to their native country. My endeavor was to obtain 
liberty for the municipal country in which I was born,"" 
and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine 

*' Alluding to Buckingham, and to the destruction of the mon- 
asteries. 
"' Ireland. 



EDMUND BURKE 391 

Mras to support with unrclaxing vigilance every right, 
every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my 
dearer, and more comprehensive country ; and not only 
to preserve those rights in his chief seat of empire, but 
in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, 
and religion, in the vast domain that still is under the 
protection, and the larger that was once under the pro- 
tection of the British crown. 

46 His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served 
his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretch- 
edness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were 
under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, 
manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom, — in which 
his Majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his 
amusement is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an im- 
prover of his native soil. 

47 His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman 
raised by the arts of a court and the protection of a Wol- 
sey "' to the eminence of a great and potent lord. His 
merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to in- 
justice, to provoke a people to rebellion. My merit was, 
to awaken the sober part of the country, that they might 
put themselves on their guard against any one potent 
lord, or any greater number of potent lords, or any com- 
bination of great leading men of any sort, if ever they 
should attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the 
reverse order, — that is, by instigating a corrupted popu- 
lace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing 



' "In full-blown dignity see Wolsey stand, 
Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand, — 
To him the church, the realm, their powers consign. 
Through him the rays of regal bounty shine." 

— Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, 



392 ^A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace's 
ancestor supported, and of which he profited in the man- 
ner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth. 
48 The pohtical merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's 
house, was that of being concerned as a counselor of state 
in advising, and in his person executing the conditions 
of a dishonorable peace with France; the surrendering 
the fortress of Boulogne,"* then our out-guard on the 
continent. By that surrender, Calais,"^ the key of France, 
and the bridle in the mouth of that power, was, not many 
years afterward, finally lost."' My merit has been in 
resisting the power and pride of France, under any form 
of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and 
earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it 
could assume; the worst indeed which the prime cause 
and principle of all evil could possibly give it. It was 
my endeavor by every means to excite a spirit in the 
House, where I had the honor of a seat, for carrying 
on with early vigor and decision, the most clearly just 
and necessary war, that this or any nation ever carried 
on; in order to save my country from the iron yoke of 
its power, and from the more dreadful contagion of its 
principles ; to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure 
and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good 



"* Taken by Henry VIIL, but surrendered in a few years. 
"* Starved into surrender to Edward III. in 1347, and for over 
two hundred years held to be "the brightest jewel in the English 
crown." 

*° For this loss, Queen Mary knew no consolation. 
"Queen Mary's saying serves for me 
(When fortune's malice 
Lost her, Calais) — 
Open my heart, and you will see 
Graved inside of it, 'Italy.' " — Browning. 



'EDMUND B URKE 393 

nature, and good humor of the people of England, from 
the dreadful pestilence which beginning in France, threat- 
ens to lay waste the whole moral, and in a great degree 
the whole physical world, having done both in the focus 
of its most intense malignity. 

49 The labors of his Grace's founder merited the curses," 
not loud but deep, of the Commons of England, on whom 
he and his master had effected a complete Parliamentary 
reform, by making them in their slavery and humiliation, 
the true and adequate representatives of a debased, de- 
graded, and undone people. My merits were, in having 
had an active, though not always an obstentatious ° share, 
in every one act, without exception, of undisputed con- 
stitutional utility in my time, and in having supported 
on all occasions, the authority, and efficiency, and the 
privileges of the Commons of Great Britain, I ended 
my services by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on 
their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a 
vindication of their constitutional conduct. I labored in 
all things to merit their inward approbation, and (alpng 
with the assistance of the largest, and greatest, and best 
of my endeavors) I received their free, unbiased, public, 
and solemn thanks. 

50 Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of 
the Crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford's 
fortune as balanced against mine. In the name of com- 
mon sense,' why should the Duke of Bedford think that 
none but of the House of Russell are entitled to the 



"And that which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
I must not look to have ; but, in their stead. 
Curses, not loud, but deep." 

— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3. 



394 ^ LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

favor of the Crown. Why should he imagine that no 
king of England has been capable of judging of merit but 
King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon m^, he 
is a little mistaken : all virtue did not end in the first 
Earl of Bedford ; all discernment did not lose its vision 
when his creator closed his eyes. Let him remit his 
rigor on the disproportion between merit and reward in 
others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of 
his fortune. They will regard with much more satisfac- 
tion, as he will contemplate with infinitely more advan- 
tage, whatever in his pedigree has been dulcified ° by an 
exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of gen- 
erations from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the 
spring. It is little to be doubted that several of his fore- 
fathers in that long series have degenerated "^ into honor 
and virtue. Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) 
reject with scorn and horror, the counsels of the lecturers, 
those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would 
tempt him in the troubles of his country, to seek another 
enormous fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility, 
and the plunder of another church. Let him (and I trust 
that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth, and 
all the resources of his wealth, to crush rebellious prin- 
ciples which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious 
movements that have no provocation in tyranny. 
51 Then will be forgot the rebellions, which, by a doubt- 
ful priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extin- 
guished. On such a conduct in the noble Dlike, many of 
his countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give 
way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and in the dash- 



' "The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, 
But Shadwell never deviates into sense." 

— Dryden's Mac Flccknoe, lines 19 and 20. 



EDMUND BURKE 395 

ing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that if 
the fates had found no other way in which they could 
give a Duke of Bedford and his opulence ° as props to a 
tottering world, then the butchery of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham "' might be tolerated ; it might be regarded even 
with complacency, whilst in the heir '" of confiscation they 
saw the sympathizing comforter of the martyrs, who 
suffer under the cruel confiscation of this day ; whilst they 
beheld with admiration his zealous protection of the vir- 
tuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manly sup- 
port of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry 
of his native land. Then his Grace's merit would be pure 
and new, and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honor. As 
he pleased he might reflect honor on his pjedecessors, or 
throw it forward on those who were to succeed him. He 
might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the 
root of it, as he thought proper. 

52 Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of 
succession, I should have been, according to my medioc- 
rity and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of 
founder of a family: I should have left a son, who, in all 
the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in 
science, in erudition, ° in genius, in taste, in honor, in 
generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and 
every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown 
himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of 
those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon 
would have wanted all plausibility ° in his attack upon 
that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. 
He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and sym- 



"» Read Henry VIII., Act II, Scene I. 
'" Bedford. 



396 'A LETTER TO 'A NOBLE LORD 

metrized every disproportion. It would not have been for 
that successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir 
of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a 
salient,® living spring of generous and manly action. 
Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty 
of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he 
had received. He was made a public creature, and had 
no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some 
duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man 
is not easily supplied. 

53 But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, 
and whose wisdom it behooves us not at all to dispute, 
has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my 
querulous ° weakness might suggest) a far better. The 
storm has gone over me ; and I lie like one of those old 
oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I 
am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, 
and lie prostrate on the earth. There, and prostrate 
there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, and 
in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble my- 
self before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to 
repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The 
patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the con- 
vulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted 
himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so 
I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with 
a considerable degree of verbal asperity, ° those ill-na- 
tured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to read 
moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. 
I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the 
gate." Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself if in 



"As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man ; so are chil- 



EDMUND BURKE 397 

this hard season ''' I would give a peck of refuse wheat 
for all that is called fame and honor in the world. This 
is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privi- 
lege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. 
But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are 
made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It 
is an instinct ; and under the direction of reason, instinct 
is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They 
who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. 
They who should have been to me as posterity are in the 
place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which 
ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he 
would have performed to me : I owe it to him to show 
that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would 
have it, from an unworthy parent. 

54 The Crown has considered me after long service ; the 
Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He 
has had a long credit for any service which he may per- 
form hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, 
in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. 
But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that 
Constitution which secures his own utility or his own 
insignificance, or how he discourages those who take up 
even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like 
the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the 
worthless. His grants are engrafted on the public law of 
Europe, covered with the awful hoar ° of innumerable 
ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescrip- 



dren of the youth. HJappy is the man that hath his quiver full of 
them ; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with 
[subdue] the enemies in the gate." — Psalm 127. 
" A period of great distress in England. 



398 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

tion " found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from 
which the jejuneness ° and penury ° of our municipal law 
has by degrees been enriched and strengthened. This 
prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bring- 
ing to its perfection. The Duke of Bedford will stand 
as long as prescriptive ° law endures — as long as the 
great, stable laws of property, common to us with all civil- 
ized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the 
smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims, principles, or 
precedents of the grand Revolution. They are secure 
against all changes but one. The whole Revolutionary 
system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, com- 
ment, are not only not the same, but they are the very 
reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws 
on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the gov- 
ernments of the world. The learned professors of the 
rights of man regard prescription not as a title to bar all 
claim set up against old possession, but they look on pre- 
scription as itself a bar against the possessor and pro- 
prietor.'* They hold an immemorial possession to be no 
more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated 
injustice. 

55 Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their 
law. But as to our country, and our race, as long as the 
well-compacted structure of our church and state, the 
sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended 
by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and 
a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British 
Sion — as long as the British monarchy, not more limited 



''^ Title based upon immemorial use. 

''* That instead of "nine points," possession is not a single 
point. 



EDMUND BURKE 399 

than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the 
proud Keep " of Windsor, rising in the majesty of pro- 
portion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and 
coeval ° towers — as long as this awful structure shall 
oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds 
and dikes of the low, fat Bedford level '" will have noth- 
ing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levelers of 
France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and 
his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm, 
— the triple cord which no man can break, — the solemn, 
sworn, constitutional frank-pledge ° of this nation, the 
firm guarantees of each other's being and each other's 
rights, the joint and several securities, each in its place 
and order, for every kind and every quality of property 
and of dignity, — as long as these endure, so long the 
Diuke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together, the 
high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of 
rapacity, the low from the iron hand of oppression and 
the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen ! and so be it, and 
so it will be, — 

"Dum domus Aene^e Capitoli immobile saxnm 
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit." " 

56 But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its so- 
phistical rights of man to falsify the account, and its 
sword as a make-weight to throw into the scale, shall be 
introduced into our city by a misguided populace, set on 
by proud, great men, themselves blinded and intoxicated 



" Castle. 

" This family has reclaimed an immense extent of marsh land. 

" "While the house of y^neas shall dwell near the immovable 
rock of the Capitol, and the Roman shall hold the reins of govern- 
ment." 



400 'A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

by a frantic ambition, we shall all of ns perish and be 
overwhelmed in a common ruin. If a great storm blow on 
our coast, it will cast the whales on the strand, as well 
as the periwinkles. His Grace will not survive the poor 
grantee he despises — no, not for a twelvemonth. If the 
great look for safety in the services they render to this 
Gallic cause, it is to be foolish even above the weight of 
privilege allowed to wealth. If his Grace be one of those 
whom they endeavor to proselytize, he ought to be aware 
of the character of the sect whose doctrines he is invited 
to embrace. With them insurrection is the most sacred 
of revolutionary duties to the state. Ingratitude to bene- 
factors is the first of revolutionary virtues. Ingratitude 
is, indeed, their four cardinal virtues compacted and 
amalgamated into one; and he will find it in everything 
that has happened since the commencement of the philo- 
sophic Revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of 
having performed the duty of insurrection against the or- 
der he lives in, — God forbid he ever should ! — the merit 
of others will be to perform the duty of insurrection 
against him. If he pleads — again God forbid he should ! 
and I do not suspect he will — his ingratitude to the 
crown for its creation of his family, others will plead their 
right and duty to pay him in kind. They will laugh, in- 
deed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. His 
deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of 
his evidence-room, and burnt to the tune of Ca ira ''^ in 
the courts of Bedford (then Equality) House. 
57 Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile 
reproaches to me with a friendly admonition to himself? 



" A revolutionary song in Paris. It is said that Franklin gave 
it much vogue. 



EDMUND BURKE 401 

Can I be blamed, for pointing out to him in what manner 
he is Hke to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philoso- 
phers of France should proselytize any considerable part 
of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, 
should conquer that government, to which his Grace 
does not seem to me to give all the support his own 
security demands? Surely it is proper, that he, and that 
others like him, should know the true genius of this sect ; 
what their opinions are ; what they have done ; and to 
whom; and what (if a prognostic" is to be formed from 
the dispositions and actions of men) it is certain they 
will do hereafter. He ought to know, that they have 
sworn assistance, the only engagement they ever will 
keep, to all in this country, who bear a resemblance to 
themselves, and who think as such, that The whole duty 
of man '^ consists in destruction. They are a misallied 
and disparaged branch of the house of Nimrod.^** They 
are the Duke of Bedford's natural hunters, and he is 
their natural game. Because he is not very profoundly, 
reflecting, he sleeps in profound security : they, on the 
contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and 
though far removed from any knowledge, which makes 
men estimable or useful, in all the instruments and re- 
sources of evil, their leaders are not meanly instructed, 
or insufficiently furnished. In the French revolution 
everything is new ; and, from want of preparation to 
meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. 
Never, before this time, was a set of literary men, con- 



'" The title of a book once much read. 

*" " He was a mighty hunter before the Lord ; wherefore it is 
»aid, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord." — 
Uenesis lo : p. 

26 



402 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

verted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never be- 
fore, did a den of bravoes and banditti, assume the garb 
and tone of an academy of philosophers. 
58 Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, 
monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despic- 
able enemies. But if they are formidable as foes, as 
friends they are dreadful indeed. The men of property 
in France confiding in a force, which seemed to be irre- 
sistible, because it had never been tried, neglected to 
prepare for a conflict with their enemies at their own 
weapons. They were found in such a situation as the 
Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, 
the cavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of a handful of 
bearded men,^^ whom they did not know to exist in nature. 
This is a comparison that some, I think, have made; 
and it is just. In France they had their enemies within 
their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of 
them. But they had not sagacity to discern their savage 
character. They seemed tame, and even caressing. They 
had nothing but douce humanitc ^- in their mouth. They 
could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on 
the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice 
made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed 
in the world disturbed their repose. Military glory was 
no more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly 
would they hear of self-defense, which they reduced 
within such bounds, as to leave it no defense at all. All 
this while they meditated the confiscations and massacres 
we have seen. Had any one told these unfortunate noble- 
men and gentlemen, how, and by whom, the grand fabric 



" Under " stout Cortez." 

^^ Sweet humanity — human kindness. 



EDMUND BURKE 403 

of the French monarchy under which they flourished 
would be subverted, they would not have pitied him as 
a visionary, but would have turned from him as what 
they call a maiivais plaisant^^ Yet we have seen what 
has happened. The persons who have suffered from the 
cannibal philosophy of France, are so like the Duke of 
Bedford, that nothing but his Grace's probably not speak- 
ing quite so good French, could enable us to find out any 
difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles 
as he, and were of full as illustrious a race : some few of 
them had fortunes as ample; several of them, without 
meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford, 
were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well 
educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of 
honor as he is. And to all this they had added the 
powerful out-guard of a military profession, which, in 
its nature, renders men somewhat more cautious than 
those who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoy- 
ment of undisturbed possessions. But security ^* was 
their ruin. They are dashed to pieces in the storm, and 
our shores are covered with the wrecks. If they had been 
aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never 
could have happened. 

59 I assure his Grace, that if I state to him the designs of 
his enemies in a manner which may appear to him ludi- 
crous and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not 
exactly happened, point by point, but twenty-four miles 
from our own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified 
faction, more encouraged than others are warneci oy what 

^ a bad pleasant ; i. e., a social nuisance or practical joker. 
■* " And you all know security (without care) 

Is mortal's chiefest Qnemy."— Macbeth, Act III, Scene 5. 



404 'A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

has happened in France, look at him and his landed 
possessions as an object at once of curiosity and rapacity. 
He is made for them in every part of their double char- 
acter. As robbers, to them he is a noble booty ; as specu- 
latists, he is a glorious subject for their experimental 
philosophy. He affords matter for an extensive analysis 
in all the branches of their science, geometrical, physical, 
civil, and political. These philosophers are fanatics. 
Independent of any interest, which, if it operated alone, 
would make them much more tractable, they are carried 
with such a headlong rage towards every desperate trial, 
that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the 
slightest of their experiments. I am better able to enter 
into the character of this description of men than the 
noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in 
the world. Without any considerable pretensions to lit- 
erature in myself, I have aspired to the love of letters. I 
have lived for a great many years in habitudes *^ with 
those who professed them. I can form a tolerable esti- 
mate of what is likely to happen from a character chiefly 
dependent for fame and fortune on knowledge and talent, 
as well in its morbid and perverted state as in that which 
is sound and natural. Naturally men so formed and fin- 
ished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But 
when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which 
was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, 
which is now the case, and when in that state they come 
to understand one another, and to act in corps, a more 
dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell ^^ to scourge 

^ relations. 

** " Not in the legions 

Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd 

In evils to top Macbeth." — Macbeth, Act IV, Scene .>. 



EDMUND BURKE 405 

mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the 
heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes nearer 
to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty 
and passion of a man. It is like that of the Principle of 
Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated," 
defecated" evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate hu- 
manity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls 
the " compunctious visitings of nature " will sometimes 
knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous 
speculations.^^ But they have a means of compounding 
with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved : they 
only give it a long prorogation." They are ready to de- 
clare that they do not think two thousand years too long 
a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable 
that they never see any way to their projected good but 
by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not 
fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering 
through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries 
of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their 
horizon, and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. 
The geometricians and the chemists bring — the one from 
the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the 
soot of their furnaces — dispositions that make them 
worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes 
which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is 
come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, 
and it has rendered them fearless of the danger which 
may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These 
philosophers consider men in their experiments no more 
than they do mice in an air-pump, or in a recipient of 



"' " Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 

Which thou dost glare with." — Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4, 



4o6 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, 
they look upon him, and everything that belongs to him, 
with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of 
that little, long-tailed animal that has been long the game 
of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet- 
pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two 
legs or upon four. 

60 His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting 
to an agrarian^ experiment. They are a downright insult 
upon the rights of man. They are more extensive than 
the territory of many of the Grecian republics, and they 
are, without comparison, more fertile than most of them. 
There are now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in 
Switzerland which do not possess anything like so fair 
and ample a domain. There is scope for seven philoso- 
phers to proceed in their analytical experiments upon 
Harrington's ^^ seven different forms of republics in the 
acres of this one duke. Hitherto they have been wholly 
unproductive to speculation, fitted for nothing but to 
fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still more 
to stupefy the dull English understanding. Abbe Sieyes *^ 
has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions ready 
made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every 
season and every fancy ; some with the top of the pattern 
at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top ; some 
plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their sim- 
plicity, others for their complexity ; some of blood color, 
some of houe de Paris; ®" some with directories, others 



■** Author of Oceana, a work descriptive of an ideal form of 
government. 

™ One of the most prominent leaders, by his writings, of the 
French Revolution. A Jesuit in high office, he abjured his title. 

** Paris dirt. 



EDMUND BURKE ^of 

without a direction; some with councils of elders and 
councils of youngsters, some without any council at all ; 
some where the electors choose the representatives, others 
where the representatives choose the electors; some in 
long coats, some in short cloaks ; some with pantaloons, 
some without breeches ; some with five-shilling qualifica- 
tions, some totally unqualified. So that no constitution- 
fancier may go unsuited° from his shop, provided he loves 
a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, 
confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized, 
premeditated murder, in any shapes into which they can 
be put. What a pity it is that the progress of experi- 
mental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's 
monopoly ! Such are their sentiments, I assure him ; 
such is their language, when they dare to speak ; and 
such are their proceedings, when they have the means to 
act. 

6i Their geographers, and geometricians, have been some 
time out of practice. It is some time since they have 
divided their own country into squares. That figure has 
lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands 
for new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the 
republic that find him a good subject, the chemists have 
bespoke him after the geometricians have done with him. 
As the first set have an eye in his Grace's lands, the 
chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They 
consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention in 
its present state ; but properly employed, an admirable 
material for overturning all establishments. They have 
found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for 
making other ruins, and so ad iniinituui. They have cal- 
culated what quantity of matter convertible into niter 



4o8 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and 
in what his Grace and his trustees have still suflfered 
to stand of that foolish royalist Inigo Jones,®^ in Covent 
Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike 
are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended 
into one common rubbish; and well sifted, and lixiviated," 
to crystallize into true democratic explosive insurrection- 
ary niter. Their academy del Cimcnto (per antiphrasin)®^ 
with Morveau and Hassenfrats at its head, have computed 
that the brave sans culottes may make war on all the aris- 
tocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth, out of the rubbish 
of the Duke of Bedford's buildings. 

62 While the Morveaux and Priestleys ®^ are proceeding 
with these experiments upon the Duke of Bedford's 
houses, the Sieyes, and the rest of the analytical legisla- 
tors, and constitution-venders, are quite as busy in their 
trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's 
vassals into primary assemblies, national guards, first, 
second, and third requisitioners, committees of research, 
conductors of the traveling guillotine, judges of revolu- 
tionary tribunals, legislative hangmen, supervisors of 
domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, and as- 
sessors of the maximum, 

63 The din of all this smithery ®* may some time or other 
possibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an 
endeavor to save some little matter from their experi- 
mental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the 



"A distinguished architect in the time of Queen Anne. 

■^ Using a word in a sense opposite to its true one, as Cimento, 
ciment, cement, here meaning anything but a mode of uniting. 

*^ Eminent chemists. 

** hammering. — Sentence quoted in the International and Cen- 
tury dictionaries. 



EDMUND BURKE 409 

Crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has 
received them from the pillage of superstitious corpora- 
tions, this indeed will stagger them a little, because they 
are enemies to all corporations, and to all religion. How- 
ever, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his 
Grace, or his learned council, that all such property 
belongs to the nation; and that it would be more wise for 
him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a citkcn (that 
is, according to Condorcet's "^ calculation, six months on 
an average), not to pass for an usurper upon the national 
property. This is what the Serjeants at law of the rights 
of man, will say to the puny apprentices of the common 
law of England. 

64 Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may 
as well think the garden of the Tuilleries was well pro- 
tected with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by 
the national assembly to keep the sovereign canaille from 
intruding on the retirement of the poor king of the 
French, '"^ as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between 
the savages of the revolution and their natural prey. 
Deep philosophers are no triflers ; brave sans culottes are 
no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of 
Tavistock ^^ than an Abbot of Tavistock ; the Lord of 
Woburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than 
the Prior of Woburn ; they will make no diflference be- 
tween the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a 
Covent Garden "^ of another description. They will not 
care a rush whether his coat is long or short; whether 

"* An eminent scholar and author. Member of the assembly that 
put to death Louis XVI. 
"' Louis XVL 

" An earlier title of the Duke of Bedford. 
"* Here, an estate of Bedford's. 



4IO A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

the color be purple or blue and bufif. They will not 
trouble their heads, with what part of his head, his hair 
is cut from; and they will look with equal respect on a 
tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of 
their Legcndrc,^^ or some other of their legislative 
butchers, how he cuts up ? 

65 Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the sans 
culottes carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the 
shambles are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, 
and, like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop 
windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no 
harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, 
and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, 
boiling, and stewing, that all the while they are measuring 
him, his Grace is measuring me — in invidiously compar- 
ing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the de- 
fender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on 
those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor 
innocent ! — 

" Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood." ^^'* 

66 No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and 
suffer with resignation what Providence pleases to com- 
mand or inflict ; but indeed, they are sharp incommodities° 
which beset old age.^°^ It was but the other day, that, 
on putting in order some things which had been brought 
here, on my taking leave of London forever, I looked 
over a number of fine portraits, most of them of persons 

*"A geometrician whose work was once much used as a text in 
this country. 
""> Pope. 
101 " Whatever poet, orator, or sage 

May say of it, old age is still old age." — Longfellow. 



EDMUND BURKE 411 

now dead, but whose society, in my better days, made 
this a proud and happy place. Amongst these was the 
picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist ^°- 
worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that excel- 
lent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend 
of us both, with whom we lived for many years without 
a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of 
jar, to the day of our final separation. 
67 I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest 
and best men of his age ; and I loved and cultivated him 
accordingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I 
was in his to the very last beat. It was after his trial ^"^ 
at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what 
zeal and anxious affection I attended him through that 
his agony of glory, what part my son took in the early 
flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the pious passion 
with which he attached himself to all my connections, with 
what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in court- 
ing almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he 
felt, just as I should have felt such friendship on such an 
occasion. I partook indeed of this honor, with several of 
the first, and best, and ablest in the kingdom, but I was 
behindhand with none of them ; and I am sure,, that if to 
the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total anni- 
hilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things 
had taken a different turn from what they did, I should 
have attended him to the quarter-deck ^^* with no less 



"= Reynolds. 

^"^ For his conduct of the English fleet in a fight with the French 
in 1778. He was acquitted, and received the thanks of Parliament. 

'"^ For execution ? Richard Parker, a leading spirit in a mutiny 
in the British navy, was tried by court-martial and condemned. " He 
was executed on board the Sandwich." — Miller. 



412 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

good will and more pride, though with far other feelings 
than I partook of the general flow of national joy that 
attended the justice that was done to his virtue. 

68 Pardon, my lord, the feeble garrulity" of age, which 
loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. 
At my years, we live in retrospect alone, and, wholly 
unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy — the 
best balm to all wounds — the consolation of friendship, 
in those only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the 
loss of Lord Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it 
so much as on the first day when I was attacked in the 
House of Lords. 

69 Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in 
its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his 
nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him 
that the favor of that gracious Prince ^**^ who had honored 
his virtues with the government of the navy of Great 
Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of 
his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend "® 
of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion 
and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would have 
told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might 
be becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. 
He would have told him, that when men in that rank 
lose decorum, they lose everything. 

70 On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel; but the 
public loss of him in this awful crisis — ! I speak from 
much knowledge of the person, he never would have 
listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this 
sans culotterie of France. His goodness of heart, his 

"'George III. 
"" Burke. 



EDMUND BURKE 413 

reason, his taste, his pubHc duty, his principles, his preju- 
dices, would have repelled him forever from all connec- 
tion with that horrid medley of madness, vice, impiety, 
and crime, 

71 Lord Keppel had two countries, one of descent, and 
one of birth. Their interest and their glory are the same, 
and his mind was capacious of both. His family was 
noble, and it was Dutch ; that is, he was of the oldest and 
purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people 
renowned above all others for love of their native land. 
Though it was never shown in insult to any human being. 
Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild stock 
of pride., on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted 
the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he 
was not disinclined to augment it with new honors. He 
valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for 
inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. 
He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a 
narrow mind ; conceiving that a man born in an elevated 
place, in himself was nothing, but everything in what 
went before, and what was to come after him. Without 
much speculation, but by the sure instinct of ingenuous 
feelings, and by the dictates of plain unsophisticated nat- 
ural understanding, he felt, that no great commonwealth 
could by any possibility long subsist, without a body of 
some kind or other of nobility, decorated with honor, and 
fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain that 
connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with Mr. 
Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can 
bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be 
well made without some such order of things as might, 
through a series of time, aflford a rational hope of securing 



414 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. 
He felt that nothing else can protect it against the 
levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. 
That to talk of hereditary monarchy without anything 
else of hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a 
low-minded absurdity ; fit only for those detestable " fools 
aspiring to be knaves," who began to forge in 1789, the 
false money of the French constitution. — That it is one 
fatal objection to all new fancied and new fabricated re- 
publics (among a people, who, once possessing such an 
advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it), that 
the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that cannot 
be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it 
may be replenished : men may be taken from it, or aggre- 
gated to it, but the thing itself is matter of inveterate 
opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive 
institution. He felt that this nobility in fact does not 
exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, 
and for them. 

72 I knew the man I speak of; and, if we carl divine the 
future, out of what we collect from the past, no person 
living would look with more scorn and horror on the 
impious parricide" committed on all their ancestry, and 
on the desperate attainder" passed on all their posterity, 
by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fay- 
ettes,^"^ and the Viscomtes de Noailles, and the false Peri- 
gords, and the long et caetera of the perfidious sans 
culottes of the court, who like demoniacs, possessed with 
a spirit of fallen pride^ and inverted ambition, abdicated 



"' Americans have not gone to Burke for their estimate of the 
Fayette. 



EDMUND BURKE 415 

their dignities, disowned their famiHes, betrayed the most 
sacred of all trusts, and by breaking to pieces a great 
link of society, and all the cramps and holdings of the 
state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their 
country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides them- 
selves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the 
myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who 
by their means have perished in prisons, or on scaffolds, 
or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room 
in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensa- 
tion. We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and 
the oppressed. 

73 Looking to his Batavian "^ descent, how could he bear 
to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobil- 
ity of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, 
more than all the canals, meers,° and inundations of their 
country, protected their independence, to behold them 
bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of 
the human race — in servitude to those who in no respect 
were superior in dignity, or could aspire to a better place 
than that of hangman to the tyrants to whose sceptered 
pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that sur- 
mounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the 
haughtiness of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance 
of France! 

74 Could he with patience bear, that the children of that 
nobility, who would have deluged their country and given 
it to the sea, rather than submit toi Louis XIV. who was 
then in his meridian glory, when his arms were conducted 
by the Turennes,^"** by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers ; 

™ Dutch. 
""Royalist leaders. 



41 6 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

when his councils were directed by the Colberts, and the 
Louvois; when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoig- 
nons and the Daguesseaus — that these should be given 
up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus/^" the Jourdans, 
the Santerres, under the Rollands, and Brissots, and 
Goras, and Robespierres, the Reubels, the Carnots, and 
Talliens and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, 
robbers, and revolutionary judges, that, from -the rotten 
carcass of their own murdered country, have poured 
out innumerable swarms of the lowest, and at once the 
most destructive of the classes of animated nature, which 
like columns of locusts, have laid waste the fairest part 
of the world. 

75 Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtu- 
ous patricians, that happy union of the noble and the 
burgher, who, with signal prudence and integrity, had 
long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the 
cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying com- 
merce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unex- 
ampled under their protection ? Could Keppel have borne 
that a vile faction should totally destroy this harmonious 
construction in favor of a robbing democracy founded on 
the spurious rights of man? 

76 He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well 
versed in the interests of Europe ; and he could not have 
heard with patience that the country of Grotius,"^ the 
cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest reposi- 
tories of all law, should be taught a new code by the 



"• Republican leaders. 

"' " A member of the States of Holland and the States-General, 
jurist, advocate, poet, scholar, historian, ... he stood famous 
among a crowd of famous contemporaries." — Motley's Barneveld. 



EDMUND BURKE 417 

Ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous 
foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in 
his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and turbulency of 
Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet in his 
insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic. 

77 Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau/" 
who was himself given to England along with the bless- 
ings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with revolu- 
tions of stability, with revolutions which consolidated and 
married the liberties and the interests of the two nations 
forever — could he see the fountain of British liberty 
itself in servitude to France? Could he see with patience 
a Prince of Orange expelled as a sort of diminutive des- 
pot, with every kind of contumely, from the country ^^' 
which that family of deliverers had so often rescued from 
slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country ,^^* 
which owes its liberty to his house? 

78 Would Keppel have heard with patience, that the con- 
duct to be held on such occasions was to become short by 
the knees ^^^ to the faction of the homicides, to entreat 
them quietly to retire? or if the fortune of war should 
drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked inva- 
sion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement 
made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the 
security of that, which under a foreign name ^^^ is the 
most precious part of England? What would he have 
said, if it was even proposed that the Austrian Nether- 



^*^Froin which came William the Silent and William III. of 
England. 

"^ Holland. 

"* England. 

*"> " Short by the knces, entreat for peace. ' — Swift. 

"•Hanover? 

»7 



41 8 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

lands (which ought to be a barrier to Holland, and the 
tie of an alliance, to protect her against any species of 
rule that might be erected, or even be restored in France) 
shou4d be formed into a republic under her influence, and 
dependent upon her power? 

79 But, above all, what would he have said if he had 
heard it made a matter of accusation against me by his 
nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of 
the war ? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction to 
myself (as from pride I might, but from justice I dare 
not), he would have snatched his share of it from my 
hand, and held it with the grasp of a dying convulsion 
to his end.^^^ 

80 It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to 
assume to myself the glory of what belongs to his Maj- 
esty, and to his ministers, and to his Parliament, and 
to the far greater majority of his faithful people; but, 
had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined 
to be guided by my advice, and to follow it implicitly, 
then I should have been the sole author of a war. But 
it should have been a war on my ideas and my principles. 
However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits 
with regard to the war with Regicide, he will find my 
guilt confined to that alone. He never shall, with the 
smallest color of reason, accuse me of being the author 
of a peace with Regicide. But that is high matter, and 
ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment 
as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke of 
Bedford. 

I have the honor to be, etc., 

Edmund Burkej, 

"'Sir Edward Keppel is to-day (1902) the senior rear admiral 
of the world's navies. 




'WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR' 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
1775-1864. 

Landor lived a long life, began to write early and 
wrote late, both prose and verse. 

A large part of his prose is in the form of Imaginary 
Conversations. These conversations are between scholars 
of all ages. Some of them, as in the Pentameron, where 
Boccaccio and Petrarch are the chief interlocutors, and 
not a few of the separate conversations, "are altogether 
unparalleled in any other language, and not easy to par- 
allel in English." 

4c *i 4c 

"In particular, Landor is remarkable — and, excellent 
as are many of the prose writers whom we have had since, 
he is perhaps the most remarkable — for the weight, the 
beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase." — Saints- 
bury's A History of ipth Century Literature. 

So many of the most sensitive and discriminating 
critics of this century have, in the suffrage for fame, 
listed themselves for Landor, that it is no longer permis- 
sible for men interested in the things of the mind to neg- 
lect him. He seemed almost to achieve immortality within 
his lifetime, so continuously was the subtle appreciation 
of the best yielded to him, from the far-off years when 
Shelley used at Oxford, to declaim with enthusiasm 
passages from Gehir, to the time, that seems as yesterday, 
when Swinburne made his pilgrimage to Italy, to offer 
his tribute of adoration to the old man at the close of his 
solitary and troubled career; and still each finer spirit, 

435 



436 WAL TER SA VA GE LAN DOR 

'As he passes, turns, 
And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud.' 

— G. E. Woodbury in The Atlantic Monthly. 

Of Landor's poetry, a drama, Count Julian, has many 
admirers. Gchir, the poem which Shelley grew enthusias- 
tic over, is a tale whose aim is a rebuke of the ambition of 
tyrants. It is also a story of the loves of Tamar and the 
Nymph, of Gebir and Gioraba. 

It contains faultless passages, as the lines descriptive 
of the sea-shell which Wordsworth seems to have con- 
sciously or unconsciously "adapted." Whether to the bet- 
terment of the passage is a matter of taste. 

Said the "nymph divine" to Tamar, the brother of 
Gebir : — 

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue 

Within, and they that luster have imbibed 

In the sun's palace porch, where when unyoked 

His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave. 

Shake one and it awakens, then apply 

Its polished lips to your attentive ear, 

And it remembers its august abodes. 

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. 

Lines of rich full tone are scattered through the 
poem : — 

1. Oh, for the spirit of that matchless man 
Whom Nature led throughout her whole domain. 

Though panting in the play-hour of my youth 
I drank of Avon, too, a dangerous draught. 
That roused within the feverish thirst of song. 

2. Here also those who boasted of their zeal. 
And loved their country for the spoils it gave. 

3. Fears, like the needle verging to the pole. 
Tremble and tremble into certainty. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 437 

4. The silent oars now dip their level wings, 

And weary with slrong stroke the whitening wave 

5. Go, from their midnight darkness wake the woods. 
Woo the lone forest in her last retreat. 

Like Charles James Fox, Landor beheld in the French 
Revolution and in Bonaparte's early victories the hope 
of the world. Its later chapters led him, as they did 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, into the other camp. With 
Landor this was a literal leading, as he paid for the 
equipment of one thousand soldiers, and with them joined 
the Spanish army to resist Napoleon. 



SOUTHEY^ AND PORSON^ 



P or son. I suspect, Mr, Southey, you are angry with 
me for the freedom with which I have spoken of your 
poetry and Wordsworth's. 

Southey. What could have induced you to imagine 
it, Mr. Professor? You have indeed bent your eyes upon 
me, since we have been together, with somewhat of fierce- 
ness and defiance : I presume you fancied me to be a com- 
mentator. You wrong me in your behef that any opinion 
on my poetical works hath molested me ; but you afford 
me more than compensation in supposing me acutely sen- 
sible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must con- 
verse on these topics, we will converse on him. What 
man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or 
adorned it with nobler studies ? 

Porson. I believe so; and they who attack him with 
virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I 
have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the 
Pursuits of Literature, could not construe a Greek sen- 
tence or scan a verse ; and I have fallen on the very Index 
from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. 
This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met 
with in the course of my reading, which has lain, you 
know, in a province where impudence is no rarity. 



'The third of what Saintsbury calls "a curiously dissimilar 
trio," Wordsworth and Coleridge being, of course, the first and 
second. He wrote abundant prose, his Nelson being regarded a 
model piece of biographical work, and abundant poetry. 

2 His name stands for Greek scholarship — "the greatest phi- 
lologist of the age," said Macaulay; "sulky, abusive, and intoler- 
able," said Byron. 

439 



440 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

I had visited a friend in King's Road when he entered. 

"Have you seen the Reviezvf cried he. "Worse 
than ever! I am resolved to insert a paragraph in the 
papers, declaring that I had no concern in the last num- 
ber." 

"Is it so very bad?" said I, quietly. 

"Infamous! detestable!" exclaimed he. 

"Sit down, then: nobody will believe you," was my 
answer. 

Since that morning he has discovered that I drink 
harder' than usual, that my faculties are wearing fast 
away, that once, indeed, I had some Greek in my head, 
but — he then claps the forefinger to the side of his nose, 
turns his eye slowly upward, and looks compassionately 
and calmly. 

Sonthcy. Come, Mr. Porson, grant him his merits: 
no critic is better contrived to make any work a monthly 
one, no writer more dexterous in giving a finishing touch. 
(« , Porson. The plagiary* has a greater latitude of choice 
than we; and if he brings home a parsnip or turnip-top, 
when he could as easily have pocketed a nectarine or a 
pineapple, he must be a blockhead. I never heard the 
name of the Pursuer of Literature, who has little more 
merit in having stolen than he would have had if he had 
never stolen at all ; and I have forgotten that other man's, 
who evinced his fitness to be the censor" of our age, by a 
translation of the most naked and impure satires of an- 
tiquity — those of Juvenal, which owe their preservation 
to the partiality of the Friars. I shall entertain an un- 



3 " Porson would drink ink rather than not drink at all." — 
Home Tooke. 

* One who claims to be the author of something he did not 
write. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 441 

favorable opinion of him if he has translated them well : 
pray, has he? 

Southey. Indeed, I do not know. I read poets for 
their poetry, and to extract that nutriment of the intellect 
and of the heart which poetry should contain."- I never 
listen to the swans of the cesspool, and must declare that 
nothing- is heavier to me than rottenness and corruption. 
Porson. You are right, sir, perfectly right. A trans- 
lator of Juvenal would open a public drain to look for a 
needle, and may miss it. My nose is not easily offended ; 
but I must have something to fill my belly. Come, we will 
lay aside the scrip of the transpositor" and the pouch of 
the pursuer, in reserve for the days of unleavened bread ; 
and again, if you please, to the lakes and mountains.' 
Now we are both in better humor, I must bring you to a 
confession that in your friend Wordsworth there is occa- 
sionally a little trash. 

Southey. A haunch of venison would be trash to a 
Brahmin, a bottle of Burgundy. to the xerif° of Mecca. 
We are guided by precept, by habit, by taste, by consti- 
tution. Hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been de- 
livered down to us from authority; and if it can be 
demonstrated, as I think it may be, that the authority is 
inadequate, and that the dictates are often inapplicable 
and often misinterpreted, you will allow me to remove the 
cause out of court. Every man can see what is very bad 
in a poem ; almost every one can see what is very good : 
but you, Mr. Porson, who have turned over all the vol- 
umes of all the commentators, will inform me whether 

^ Well to do. 

«transposer. The Imperial Dictionary quotes this clause. 

' This is, back to the Lake School's head. 



442 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

I am right or wrong in asserting that no critic hath yet 
appeared who hath been able to fix or to discern the exact 
degrees of excellence above a certain point. 

Porson. None. 

Sonthey. The reason is, because the eyes of no one 
have been upon a level with it. Supposing, for the sake 
of argument, the contest of Hesiod and Hbmer to have 
taken place : the judges who decided in favor of the worse, 
and he, indeed, in the poetry has little merit, may have 
been elegant, wise, and conscientious men. Their deci- 
sion was in favor of that to the species of which they had 
been the most accustomed. Corinna ' was preferred to 
Pindar " no fewer than five times, and the best judges in 
Greece gave her the preference; yet whatever were her 
powers, and beyond a question they were extraordinary, 
we may assure ourselves that she stood many degrees 
below Pindar. Nothing is more absurd than the report 
that the judges were prepossessed by her beauty. Plu- 
tarch tells us that she was much older than her competitor, 
who' consulted her judgment in his earlier odes. Now, 
granting their first competition to have been when Pindar 
was twenty years old, and that the others were in the 
years succeeding, her beauty must have been somewhat 
on the decline ; for in Greece there are few women who 
retain the graces, none who retain the bloom of youth, 
beyond the twenty-third year. Hfcr countenance, I doubt 
not, was expressive: but expression, although it gives 
beauty to men, makes women pay dearly for its stamp, 
and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their loveli- 
ness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in 
quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to la- 

* Greek lyric poets. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 443 

borious thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths 
of fancy. We may be convinced that the verdict of the 
judges was biased by nothing else than the habitudes ° 
of thinking; we may be convinced, too, that living in an 
age when poetry was cultivated highly, and selected from 
the most acute and the most dispassionate, they were 
subject to no greater errors of opinion than are the learned 
messmates of our English colleges. 

Porson. You are more liberal in your largesses ® to 
the fair Greeks than a friend of mine was, who resided in 
Athens' to acquire the language. He assured me that 
beauty there was in bud at thirteen, in full blossom at 
fifteen, losing a leaf or two every day at seventeen, trem- 
bling on the thorn at nineteen, and under the tree at 
twenty, 

Southey. Mr, Porson, it does not appear to me that 
anything more is necessary, in the first instance, than to 
interrogate our hearts in what manner they have been 
aflfected. If the ear is satisfied ; if at one moment a tumult 
is aroused in the breast, and tranquillized at another, with 
a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both 
cases ; if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a 
strong excitement to thought, to imagination, to sensibil- 
ity ; above all, if we sat down with some propensities 
toward evil, and walk away with much stronger toward 
■good, in the midst of a world which we never had entered 
and of which we never had dreamed before — shall we 
perversely put on again the old man of criticism, and dis- 
semble that we have been conducted by a most beneficent 
and most potent genius ? Nothing proves to me so mani- 



' judgment as to the fading of their charms. 



444 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

festly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettos °, 
as when I observe how little hath been objected against 
those who have substituted words for things, and how 
much against those who have reinstated things for words. 
Let Wordsworth prove to the world that there may be 
animation without blood and broken bones, and tender- 
ness remote from the stews. Some will doubt it; for 
even things the most evident are often but little perceived 
and strangely estimated. Swift ridiculed the music of 
Handel and the generalship of Marlborough ; Pope the 
perspicacity and the scholarship of Bentley ; Gray the 
abilities of Shaftesbury and the eloquence of Rousseau. 
Shakespeare hardly found those who would collect his 
tragedies ; Milton was read from godliness ; Virgil- was 
antiquated and rustic ; Cicero, Asiatic. What a rabble has 
persecuted my friend! An elephant is born to be con- 
sumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable soli- 
tudes: Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why re- 
pine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, 
and recollect that God in the creation left his noblest 
creature at the mercy of a serpent. 

* * * 

Person. Wordsworth goes out of his way to be at- 
tacked ; he picks up a piece of dirt, throws it on the carpet 
in the midst of the company, and cries. This is a better 
man than any of yoii! He does indeed mold the base 
material into what form he chooses ; but why not rather 
invite us to contemplate it than challenge us to condemn 
it? Here surely is false taste. 

Southey. The principal and the most general accusa- 
tion against him is, that the vehicle of his thoughts is un- 
equal to them. Now did ever the judges at the Olympic 
games say, "We would have awarded to you the meed 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 445 

of victory, if your chariot had been equal to your horses: 
it is true they have won ; but the people are displeased at 
a car neither new nor richly gilt, and without a gryphon ° 
or sphinx ° engraved on the axle ?" You admire simplic- 
ity in Euripides; you censure it in Wordsworth: believe 
me, sir, it arises in neither from penury of thought — 
which seldom has produced it — but from the strength of 
temperance, and at the suggestion of principle. 

Take up a poem of Wordsworth's and read it — I 
would rather say, read them all ; and, knowing that a 
mind like yours must grasp closely what comes within it, 
I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our country, 
since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less of 
strain and less of ostentation. I would, however, by his 
permission, lay before you for this purpose a poem which 
is yet unpublished and incomplete. 

Porson. Pity, with such abilities, he does not imitate 
the ancients somewhat more. 

Soiithey. Whom did they imitate? If his genius is 
equal to theirs he has no need of a guide. He also will be 
an ancient; and the very counterparts of those who now 
decry him will extol him a thousand years hence in malig- 
nitv to the moderns. 



JOHN OF GAUNT^ AND JOANNA OF 
KENT' 



Joanna. How is this, my cousin, that you are be- 
sieged " in your own house, by the citizens of London ? I 
thought you were their idol. 

Gaunt. If their idol, madam, I am one which they 
may tread on as they list when down ; but which, by my 
soul and knighthood ! the ten best battle-axes among them 
shall find it hard work to unshrine.° 

Pardon me : I have no right perhaps to take or touch 
this hand ; yet, my sister, bricks and stones and arrows 
are not presents fit for you. Let me conduct you some 
paces hence. 

Joanna. I will speak to those below in the street. 
Quit my hand : they shall obey me. 

Gaunt. If you intend to order my death, madam, your 
guards who have entered my court, and whose spurs and 
halberts I hear upon the staircase, may overpower my 
domestics; and, seeing no such escape as becomes my 
dignity, I submit to you. Behold my sword and gauntlet 
at your feet! Some formalities, I trust, will be used in 
the proceedings against me. Entitle me, in my attainder. 



' "Time-honored Lancaster," uncle of Richard II., and father 
of Henry IV., but with a higher title, the protector of Chaucer. 

2 Wife of the Black Prince and mother of Richard II. 

' " In the face of the popular hatred toward John of Gaunt, 
Langland (in TAe Complaint of Piers the Ploughman), paints the 
Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might 
be, at any rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the 
mice of the people." — Green' s A Shorter History of England. 
446 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR aA7 

not John of Gaunt, not Duke of Lancaster, not King of 
Castile ; nor commemorate my father, the most glorious 
of princes, the vanquisher and pardoner of the most 
powerful ; nor style me, what those who loved or who 
flattered me did when I was happier, cousin to the Fair 
Maid of Kent. Joanna, those days are over! But no 
enemy, no law, no eternity can take away from me or 
move further off, my affinity in blood to the conqueror * 
in the field of Crecy, of Poitiers, and Najora. Edward 
was my brother when he was but your cousin; and the 
edge of my shield has clinked on his in many a battle. 
Yes, we were ever near — if not in worth, in danger. She 
weeps. 

Joanna. Attainder ! God avert it ! Duke of Lancas- 
ter, what dark thought — alas ! that the Regency " should 
have known it ! I came hither, sir, for no such purpose 
as to ensnare or incriminate or alarm you. 

These weeds might surely have protected me from the 
fresh tears you have drawn forth. 

Gaunt. Sister, be comforted ! this visor, too, has felt 
them. 

Joanna. O my Edward ! my own so lately ! Thy 
memory — thy beloved image — which never hath aban- 
doned me, makes me bold: I dare not say "generous;'* 
for in saying it I should cease to be so — and who could 
be called generous by the side of thee ? I will rescue from 
perdition the enemy of my son. 

Cousin, you loved your brother. Love, then, what was 
dearer to him than his life : protect what he, valiant as 
you have seen him, cannot! The father, who foiled so 

* Edward, the Black Prince. 
^Duke of Gloucester, probably. 



448 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

many, hath left no enemies; the innocent child, who can 
injure no one, finds them ! 

Why have you unlaced and laid aside your visor? Do 
not expose your body to those missiles. Hold your shield 
before yourself, and step aside. I need it not, I am 
resolved — 

Gaunt. On what, my cousin? Speak, and, by the 
saints ! it shall be done. This breast is your shield ; this 
arm is mine. 

Joanna. Heavens ! who could have hurled those 
masses of stone from below ? they stunned me. Did they 
descend all of them together ; or did they split into frag- 
ments on hitting the pavement ? 

Gaunt. Truly, I was not looking that way : they came, 
I must believe, while you were speaking. 

Joanna. Aside, . aside! further back! disregard me! 
Look ! that last arrow sticks half its head deep in the 
wainscoat. It shook so violently I did not see the feather 
at first. 

No, no, Lancaster ! I will not permit it. Take your 
shield up again ; and keep it all before you. Now step 
aside: I am resolved to prove whether the people will 
hear me. 

Gaunt. Then, madam, by your leave 

Joanna. Hold ! 

Gaunt. Villains! take back to your kitchens those 
spits and skewers that you, forsooth, would fain call 
swords and arrows ; and keep your bricks and stones for 
your graves ! 

Joanna. Imprudent man ! who can save you ? I shall 
be frightened : I must speak at once. 

O good kind people ! ye who so greatly loved me, when 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 449 

I am sure I had done nothing to deserve it, have I (un- 
happy me !) no merit with you now, when I would assuage 
your anger, protect your fame, and send you home 
contented with yourselves and me? Who is he, worthy 
citizens, whom ye would drag to slaughter ? 

True, indeed, he did revile some one. Neither I nor 
you can say whom — some feaster and rioter, it seems, 
who had little right (he thought) to carry sword or bow, 
and who, to show it, hath slunk away. And then another 
raised his anger: he was indignant that, under his roof, 
a woman should be exposed to stoning. Which of you 
would not be as choleric in a like affront? In the house 
of which among you should I not be protected as reso- 
lutely ? 

No, no: I never can believe those angry cries. Let 
none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son, of his 
king, your darling child, Richard. Are your fears more 
lively than a poor weak female's ? than a mother's ? yours, 
whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his 
father, naming each — he, John of Gaunt, the defender 
of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the rallying 
signal of the desperately brave ! 

Retire, Duke of Lancaster ! This is no time 

Gaunt. Madam, I obey ; but not through terror of 
that puddle at the house-door, which my handful of 
dust would dry up. Deign to command me ! 

Jomma. In the name of my son, then, retire ! 

Gaunt. Angelic goodness ! I must fairly win it. 

Joanna. I think I know his voice that crieth out, 
"Who will answer for him?" An honest and loyal 
man's, one who would counsel and save me in my diffi- 
culty and danger. With what pleasure and satisfaction, 
29 



450 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

with what perfect joy and confidence, do I answer our 
right-trusty and well-judging friend! 

"Let Lancaster bring his sureties," say you, "and, we 
separate." A moment yet before we separate ; if I might 
delay you so long, to receive your sanction of those se- 
curities: for, in such grave matters, it would ill become 
us to be over-hasty. I could bring fifty, I could bring a 
hundred, not from among soldiers, not from among court- 
iers; but selected from yourselves, were it equitable and 
fair to show such partialities, or decorous in the parent 
and guardian of a king to ofifer any other than herself. 

Raised by the hand of the Almighty from amidst you, 
but still one of you, if the mother of a family is a part of 
it, here I stand surety for John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- 
caster, for his loyalty and allegiance. 

Gaunt (running back toward Joanna). Are the 
rioters, then, bursting into the chamber through the 
windows ? 

Joanna. The windows and doors of this solid edifice 
rattled and shook at the people's acclamation. My word is 
given for you : this was theirs in return. Lancaster ! what 
a voice have the people when they speak out ! It shakes 
me with astonishment, almost with consternation, while it 
establishes the throne : what must it be when it is lifted 
up in vengeance! 

Gaunt. Wind ; vapor 

Joanna. Which none can wield nor hold. Need I 
say this to my cousin of Lancaster? 

Gaunt. Rather say, madam, that there is always one 
star above which can tranquillize and control them. 

Joanna. Go, cousin I another time more sincerity ! 

Gaunt. You have this day saved my life from the 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 451 

people; for I now see my danger better, when it is no 
longer close before me. My Christ ! if ever I forget 

Joanna. Swear not: every man in England hath 
sworn what you would swear. But if you abandon my 
Richard, my brave and beautiful child, may — Oh! I 
could never curse, nor wish an evil ; but, if you desert 
him in the hour of need, you will think of those who 
have not deserted you, and your own great heart will 
lie heavy on you, Lancaster ! 

Am I graver than I ought to be, that you look de- 
jected? Come, then, gentle cousin, lead me to my horse, 
and accompany me home. Richard will embrace us ten- 
derly. Every one is dear to every other upon rising out 
fresh from peril; affectionately then will he look, sweet 
boy, upon his mother and his uncle! Never mind how 
many questions he may ask you, nor how strange ones. 
His only displeasure, if he has any, will be that he stood 
not against the rioters or among them. 

Gaunt. Older than he have been as fond of mischief, 
and as fickle in the choice of a party. 

I shall tell him that, coming to blows, the assailant is 
often in the right ; that the assailed is always. 



LEOFBIC AND GODIVA 



Godiva. There is a dearth in the land, my sweet 
Leofric! Remember how many weeks of drought we 
have had, even in the deep pastures of Leicestershire; 
and how many Sundays we have heard the same prayers 
for rain, and supphcations that it would please the Lord 
in his mercy to turn aside his anger from the poor, pining 
cattle. You, my dear husband, have imprisoned more 
than one malefactor for leaving his dead ox in the public 
way; and other hinds have fled before you out of the 
traces, in which they, and their sons and their daughters, 
and haply their old fathers and mothers, were dragging 
the abandoned wain homeward. Although we were ac- 
companied by,- many brave spearmen and skillful archers, 
it was perilous to pass the creatures which the farm-yard 
dogs, driven from the hearth by the poverty of their mas- 
ters, were tearing and devouring ; while others, bitten and 
lamed, filled the air either with long and deep howls or 
sharp and quick barkings, as they struggled with hunger 
and feebleness, or were exasperated by heat and pain. 
Nor could the thyme from the heath, nor the bruised 
branches of the fir-tree, extinguish or abate the foul odor. 

Leofric. And now, Godiva, my darling, thou art 
afraid we should be eaten up before we enter the gates of 
Coventry; or perchance that in the gardens there are no 
roses to greet thee, no sweet herbs for thy mat and pillow. 

Godiva. Leofric, I have no such fears. This is the 

month of roses : I find them everywhere since my blessed 

marriage. They, and all other sweet herbs, I know not 

why, seem to greet me wherever I look at them, as though 

452 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 453 

they knew and expected me. Surely they cannot feel 
that I am fond of them. 

Leofric. O light, laughing simpleton! But what 
wouldst thou? I came not hither to pray; and yet if 
praying would satisfy thee, or remove the drought, I 
would ride up straightway to Saint Michael's and pray 
until morning. 

Godiva. I would do the same, O Leofric! but God 
hath turned away his ear from holier lips than mine. 
Would my own dear husband hear me, if I implored him 
for what is easier to accomplish, — what he can do like 
God? 

Leofric. How I what is it ? 

Godiva. I would not, in the first hurry of your wrath, 
appeal to you, my loving Lord, in behalf of these unhappy 
men who have offended you. 

Leofric. Unhappy ! is that all ? 

Godiva. Unhappy they must surely be, to have of- 
fended you so grievously. What a soft air breathes over 
us ! how quiet and serene and still an evening ! how calm 
are the heavens and the earth ! — Shall none enjoy them ; 
not even we, my Leofric ? The sun is ready to set : let 
it never set,* O Leofric, on your anger. These are not 
my words : they are better than mine. Should they lose 
their virtue from my unworthiness in uttering them? 
Leofric. Godiva, wouldst thou plead to me for rebels ? 

Godiva. They have, then, drawn the sword against 
you ? Indeed, I knew it not. 

Leofric. They have omitted to send me my dues, 
established by my ancestors, well knowing of our nuptials, 



' " Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." 



454 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

and of the charges and festivities they require, and that in 

a season of such scarcity my own lands are insufficient. 

Godiva. If they were starving, as they said they 



were 



Leofric. Must I starve too? Is it not enough to lose 
my vassals? 

Godiva. Enough! O God! too much! too much! 
May you never lose them I Give them life, peace, com- 
fort, contentment. There are those among them who 
kissed me in my infancy, and who blessed me at the bap- 
tismal font. Leofric, Leofric! the first old man I meet 
I shall think is one of those ; and I shall think on the bless- 
ing 4ie gave, and (ah me!) on the blessing I bring back 
to him. My heart will bleed, will burst ; and he will weep 
at it ! he will weep, poor soul, for the wife of a cruel lord 
who denounces vengeance on him, who carries death into 
his family! 

Leofric. We must hold solemn festivals. 

Godiva. We must, indeed. 

Leofric. Well, then? 

Godiva. Is the clamorousness that succeeds the death 
of God's dumb creatures, are crowded halls, are slaught- 
ered cattle, festivals? — are maddening songs, and giddy 
dances, and hireling praises. from parti-colored coats? 
Can the voice of a minstrel tell us better things of our- 
selves than our own internal one might tell us ; or can his 
breath make our breath softer in sleep ? O my beloved I 
let everything be a joyance to us : it will, if we will. Sad 
is the day, and worse must follow, when we hear the black- 
bird in the garden, and do not throb with joy. But, 
Leofric, the high festival is strown by the servant of God 
upon the heart of man. It is gladness, it is thanksgiving ; 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 455 

it is the orphan, the starveling, pressed to the bosom, and 
bidden as its first commandment to remember its bene- 
factor. We will hold this festival ; the guests are ready : 
we may keep it up for weeks, and months, and years 
together, and always be the happier and the richer for 
it. The beverage of this feast, O Leofric, is sweeter than 
bee or flower or vine can give us : it flows from heaven ; 
and in heaven will it abundantly be poured out again to 
him who pours it out here abundantly. 
Leofric. Thou art wild. 

Godiva. I have, indeed, lost myself. Some Power, 
some good kind Power, melts me (body and soul and 
voice) into tenderness. and love. O my husband, we must 
obey it. Look upon me! look upon me! lift your sweet 
eyes from the ground I I will not cease to supplicate ; I 
dare not. 

Leofric. We may think upon it. 
Godiva^ O never say that ! What ! think upon good- 
ness when you can be good ? Let not the infants cry for 
sustenance! The mother of our blessed Lord will hear 
them; us never, never afterward. 

Leofric. Here comes the Bishop : we are but one mile 
from the walls. Why dismountest thou? no bishop can 
expect it. Godiva! my honor and rank among men are 
, humbled by this. Earl Godwin will hear of it. Up ! up ! 
the Bishop hath seen it: he urgeth his horse onward. 
Dost thou not hear him now upon the solid turf behind 
thee? 

Godiva. Never, no, never will I rise, O Leofric, until 
you remit this impious task — this tax on hard labor, 
on hard life. 

Leofric. Turn round : , look how the fat nag canters, 



456 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

as to the tune of a sinner's psalm, slow and hard-breath- 
ing. What reason or right can the people have to com- 
plain while their bishop's steed is so sleek and well 
caparisoned ? Inclination to change, desire to abolish old 
usages. — Up ! up ! for shame ! They shall smart for it, 
idlers ! Sir Bishop, I must blush for my young bride. 

Godiva. My husband, my husband ! will you pardon 
the city? 

Leofric. Sir Bishop ! I could not think you would 
have seen her in this plight. Will I pardon ? Yea, Godiva, 
by the holy rood, will I pardon the city, when thou ridest 
naked at noontide through the streets! 

Godiva. O my dear, cruel Leofric, where Is the heart 
you gave me ? It was not so : can mine have hardened it ? 

Bishop. Earl, thou abashest thy spouse ; she turneth 
pale, and weepeth. Lady Godiva, peace be with thee. 

Godiva. Thanks, holy man! peace will be with me 
when peace is with your city. Did; you hear my Lord's 
cruel word? 

Bishop. I did, lady. 

Godiva. Will you remember it, and pray against it? 

Bishop. Wilt thou forget it, daughter? 

Godiva. I am hot offended. 

Bishop. Angel of peace and purity! 

Godiva. But treasure it up in your heart : deem it an 
incense, good only when it is consumed and spent, ascend- 
ing with prayer and sacrifice. And, now, what was it? 

Bishop. Christ save us ; that he will pardon the city 
when thou ridest naked through the streets at noon. 

Godiva. Did he swear an oath ? 

Bishop. He sware by the holy rood. 

Godiva. My Redeemer, thou hast heard it ! save the 
city! 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 457 

Leofric. We are now upon the beginning of the pave- 
ment : these are the suburbs. Let us think of feasting : 
we may pray afterward ; to-morrow we shall rest. 

G'odiva. No judgments, then, to-morrow, Leofric? 

Leofric. None : we will carouse. 

Godiva. The saints of heaven have given me strength 
and confidence; my prayers are heard; the heart of my 
beloved is now softened. 

Leofric. Ay, ay. 

Godiva. Say, dearest Leofric, is there indeed no 
other hope, nO' other mediation ? 

Leofric. I have sworn. Beside, thou hast made me 
redden and turn my face away from thee, and all the 
knaves have seen it ; this adds to the city's crime. 

Godiva. I have blushed too, Leofric, and was not 
rash nor obdurate. 

Leofric. But thou, my sweetest, art given to blush- 
ing : there is no conquering it in thee. I wish thou hadst 
not alighted so hastily and roughly : it hath shaken down 
a sheaf of thy hair. Take heed thou sit not upon it, lest it 
anguish thee. Well done! it mingleth now sweetly with 
the cloth of gold upon the saddle, running here and there, 
as if it had life and faculties and business, and were work- 
ing thereupon some newer and cunninger device. O my 
beauteous Eve ! there is a Paradise about thee ! the world 
is refreshed as thou movest and breathest on it. I cannot 
see or think of evil where thou art. I could throw my 
arms even here about thee. No signs for me ! no shaking 
of sunbeams ! no reproof or frown of wonderment. — I 
will say it — now, then, for worse — I could close with 
my kisses thy half-open lips, ay, and those lovely and 
loving eyes, before the people. 



458 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Godiva. To-morrow you shall kiss me, and they shall 
bless you for it. I shall be very pale, for to-night I must 
fast and pray. 

Leofric. I do not hear thee; the voices of the folks 
are so loud under this archway. 

Godiva (to herself). God help them! good kind 
souls ! I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow. 
O Leofric ! could my name be forgotten, and yours alone 
remembered! But perhaps my innocence may save me 
from reproach ; and how many as innocent are in fear and 
famine ! No eye will open on me but fresh from tears. 
What a young mother for so large a family! Shall my 
youth harm me ? Under God's hand it gives me courage. 
Ah ! when will the morning come ? Ah ! when will the 
noon be over? 



DIOGENES* AND PLATO^ 



Diogenes. Stop! stop! come hither! Why lookest 
thou so scornfully and askance upon me? 

Plato. Let me go ! loose me ! I am resolved to pass. 

Diogenes. Nay, then, by Jupiter and this tub! thou 
leavest three good ells of Milesian cloth behind thee. 
Whither wouldst thou amble ? 

Plato. I am not obliged in courtesy to tell you. 

Diogenes. Upon whose errand ? Answer me directly. 

Plaio. Upon my own. 

Diogenes. Oh, then I will hold thee yet awhile. If 
it were upon another's, it might be a hardship to a good 
citizen, though not tO' a good philosopher. 

Plato. That can be no impediment to my release : you 
do not think me one. 

Diogenes. No, by my Father Jove I 

Plato. Your father I 

Diogenes. Why not ? Thou shouldst be the last man 
to doubt it. Hast not thou declared it irrational to refuse 
our belief to those who assert that they are begotten by 
the gods, though the assertion (these are thy words) be 



' The Greek who lived, sometimes, in a tub ; refused to be in- 
itiated into the mysteries of Ceres, hence was ' ' worse than an 
infidel;" visited by Alexander the Great, in reply to whether he 
wanted anything, replied, "Yes, that you would stand out of my 
sunshine." 

2 One of the most eminent of Greek philosophers and writers, 
much read in this age in the original and more in translation. 
Cicero said that he could never read Plato's description of the 
death of Socrates without tears — "■ illacrymari soleo Platonem 
leg ens." Plato believed in the immortality of the soul. " Yes, it 
must be so. Plato, thou reasonest well." — Addison's Cato. 

459 



46o IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

unfounded on reason or probability? In me there is a 
chance of it : whereas in the generation of such people as 
thou art fondest of frequenting, who claim it loudly, there 
are always too many competitors to leave it probable. 

Plato. Those who speak against the great do not 
usually speak from morality, but from envy. 

Diogenes. Thou hast a glimpse of the truth in this 
place, but as thou hast already shown thy ignorance in 
attempting to prove to me what a man is, ill can I expect 
to learn from thee what is a great man. 

Plato. No' doubt your experience and intercourse will 
afford me the information. 

Diogenes. Attend, and take it. The great man is he 
who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from an- 
other. It is he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of 
the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. 
It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak and 
fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion 
for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appear- 
ing different from what he is. It is he who can call 
together the most select company when it pleases him. 

Plato. Excuse my interruption. In the beginning of 
your definition I fancied that you were designating your 
own person, as most people do in describing what is ad- 
mirable ; now I find that you have some other in contem- 
plation. 

Diogenes. I thank thee for allowing me what perhaps 
I do possess, but what I was not then thinking of ; as is 
often the case with rich possessors : in fact, the latter part 
of the description suits me as well as any portion of the 
former. 

Plato. You may call together the best company, by 



WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 461 

using your hands in the call, as you did with me ; other- 
wise I am not sure that you would succeed in it. 

Diogenes. My thoughts are my company ; I can bring 
them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them. 
Imbecile and vicious men cannot do any of these things. 
Their thoughts are scattered, vague, uncertain, cumber- 
some : and the worst stick to them; the longest ; many in- 
deed by choice, the greater part by necessity, and accom- 
panied, some by weak wishes, others by vain remorse. 

Plato. Is there nothing of greatness, O Diogenes ! in 
exhibiting how cities and communities may be governed 
best, how morals may be kept the purest, and power be- 
come the most stable ? 

Diogenes. Something of greatness does not constitute 
the great man. Let me however see him who hath done 
what thou sayest : he must be the most universal and the 
most indefatigable traveler, he must also be the oldest 
creature, upon earth, 

Plato. How so? 

Diogenes. Because he must know perfectly the cli- 
mate, the soil, the situation, the peculiarities, of the races, 
of their allies, of their enemies ; he must have sounded 
their harbors, he must have measured the quantity of their 
arable land and pasture, of their woods and mountains ; 
he must have ascertained whether there are fisheries on 
their coast, and even what winds are prevalent. On these 
causes, with some others, depend the bodily strength, the 
numbers, the wealth, the wants, the capacities of the 
people. 

Plato. Such are low thoughts. 

Diogenes. The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her 
food under hedges : the eagle himself would be starved if 



462 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

he always soared aloft and against the sun. The sweetest 
fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it 
require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to be done 
in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border, 
would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and 
suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians 
to govern us: we want practical men, honest men, con- 
tinent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow 
to accept, and resolute never to betray one. Experiment- 
alists may be the best philosophers : they are always the 
worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they 
will know their interests. Change as little as possible, and 
correct as much. 

Philosophers are absurd from many causes, but prin- 
cipally from laying out unthriftily their distinctions. They 
set up four virtues : fortitude, prudence, temperance, and 
justice. Now a man may be a very bad one, and yet pos- 
sess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must, if he 
has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more forti- 
tude and more prudence than the greater part of those 
whom we consider as the best men. And what cruel 
wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly 
just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what 
generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from 
the earth ! Temperance and beneficence contain all other 
virtues. Take them home, Plato; split them, expound 
them ; do what thou wilt with them, if thou but use them. 

Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than 
thou ever gavest any one, and easier to remember, thou 
wert accusing me of invidiousness and malice against 
those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say the 
powerful. Thy imagination, I am well aware, had taken 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 463 

its flight toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great man, 
as earnestly and undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Per- 
sephone,' Faith! honest Plato, I have no reason to envy 
thy worthy friend Dionysius.* Look at my nose. A lad 
seven or eight years old threw an apple at me yesterday, 
while I was gazing at the clouds, and gave me nose enough 
for two moderate men. Instead of such a godsend, what 
should I have thought of my fortune if, after living all 
my lifetime among golden vases, rougher than my hand 
with their emeralds and rubies, their engravings and em- 
bossments ; among Parian caryatides ° and porphyry 
sphinxes" ; among philosophers with rings upon their fin- 
gers and linen next their skin ; and among singing-boys 
and dancing-girls, to whom alone thou speakest intelli- 
gibly — I ask thee again, what should I in reason have 
thought of my fortune, if, after these facilities and super- 
fluities, I had at last been pelted out of my house, not by 
one young rogue, but by thousands of all ages, and not 
with an apple (I wish I could say a rotten one), but with 
pebbles and broken pots ; and, to crown my deserts, had 
been compelled to become the teacher of so promising a 
generation ? Great men, forsooth ! thou knowest at last 
who they are. 

Plata. There are great men of various kinds. 

Diogenes. No, by my beard, are there not ! 

Plato. What ! are there not great captains, great geo- 
metricians, great dialectitians° ? 

3 Persephone, or Proserpine, gathering flowers in Sicily, was 
carried off by Pluto to his gloomy kingdom below, whither her 
mother Ceres undauntedly followed. 

* Dionysius the Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, invited Plato to 
his court, where he sojourned for a time. The story in old Rollin 
is surpassingly interesting. 



464 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Diogenes. Who denied it? A great man was the 
postulate. Try thy hand now at the powerful one. 

Plato. On seeing the exercise of power, a child can- 
not doubt who is powerful, more or less; for power is 
relative. All men are weak, not only if compared to the 
Demiurgos,° but if compared to the sea or the earth, or 
certain things upon each of them, such as elephants and 
whales. So placid and tranquil is the scene around us, we 
can hardly bring to mind the images of strength and force, 
the precipices, the abysses 

Diogenes. Prythee hold thy loose tongue, twinkling 
and glittering like a serpent's in the midst of luxuriance 
and rankness ! Did never this reflection of thine warn 
thee that, in human life, the precipices and abysses would 
be much farther from our admiration if we were less in- 
considerate, selfish, and vile? I will not however stop thee 
long, for thou wert going on quite consistently. As thy 
great men are fighters and wranglers, so thy mighty things 
upon the earth and sea are troublesome and intractable ° 
encumbrances. Thou perceivedst not what was greater 
in the former case, neither art thou aware what is greater 
in this. Didst thou feel the gentle air that passed us? 

Plato. I did not, just then. 

Diogenes. That air, so gentle, so imperceptible to 
thee, is more, powerful not only than all the creatures that 
breathe and live by it; not only than all the oaks of the 
forest, which it rears in an age and shatters in a moment ; 
not only than all the monsters of the sea, but than the sea 
itself, which it tosses up into foam, and breaks against 
every rock in its vast circumference; for it carries in its 
bosom, with perfect calm and composure, the incontrol- 
lable ocean and the peopled earth, like an atom of a 
feather. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 465 

To the world's turmoils and pageantries is attracted, not 
only the admiration of the populace, but the zeal of the 
orator, the enthusiasm of the poet, the investigation of the 
historian, and the contemplation of the philosopher: yet 
how silent and invisible are they in the depths of air ! Do 
I say in those depths and deserts? No; I say in the 
distance of a swallow's flight, — at the distance she rises 
above us, ere a sentence brief as this could be uttered. 

What are its mines and mountains? Fragments 
welded° up and dislocated by the expansion of water from 
below ; the most part reduced to mud, the rest to splinters. 
Afterward sprang up fire in many places, and again tore 
and mangled the mutilated carcass, and still growls over it. 

What are its cities and ramparts, and moles and monu- 
ments? Segments of a fragment, which one man puts 
together and another throws down. Here we stumble 
upon thy great ones at their work. Show me now, if 
thou canst, in history, three great warriors, or three 
great statesmen, who have acted otherwise than spite- 
ful children. 

Plato. I will begin to look for them in history when 
I have discovered the same number in the philosophers 
or the poets. A prudent man searches in his own garden 
after the plant he wants, before he casts his eyes over the 
stalls in Kenkrea or Keramicos. 

Returning to your observation on the potency of the 
air, I am not ignorant or unmindful of it. May I ven- 
ture to express my opinion to you, Diogenes, that the 
earlier discoverers and distributors of wisdom (which wis- 
dom lies among us in ruins and remnants, partly distorted 
and partly concealed by theological allegory) meant by 
Jupiter the air in its agitated state; by Juno the air in 
30 



466 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

its quiescent. These are the great agents, and therefore 
called the king and queen of the gods. Jupiter is denom- 
inated by Homer the compcller of clouds: Juno receives 
them, and remits them in showers tO' plants and animals. 

I may trust you, I hope, O Diogenes ? ^ 

Diogenes. Thou mayest lower the gods in my pres- 
ence, as safely as men in the presence of Timon." 

Plato. I would not lower them : I would exalt them. 

Diogenes. More foolish and presumptuous still ! 

Plato. Fair words, O' Sinopean ! '' I protest to you my 
aim is truth. 

Diogenes. I cannot lead thee where of a certainty thou 
mayest always find it ; but I will tell thee what it is. 
Truth is a point; the subtilest and finest; harder than 
adamant ; never tO' be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its 
only bad quality is, that it is sure tO' hurt those who touch 
it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life-blood, of 
those who press earnestly upon it. Let us away from this 
narrow lane skirted with hemlock, and pursue our road 
again through the wind and dust, toward the great man 
and the powerful. Him I would call the powerful one 
who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good 
account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great 
man, I was going on to demonstrate, is somewhat more. 
He must be able to do this, and he must have an intellect ' 
which puts into motion the intellect of others. 

Plato. Socrates, then, was your great man. 

Diogenes. He was indeed ; nor can all thou hast at- 
tributed to him ever make me think the contrary. I wish 

5 You will not make known my lack of orthodoxy? 
^Read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. 
'Native of Sinope, a city of Pontus. 
* A teacher well defined. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 467 

he could Have kept a little more at home, and have thought 
it as worth his while to converse with his own children 
as with others. 

Plato. He knew himself born for the benefit of the 
human race. 

Diogenes. Those who are born for the benefit of the 
human race go but little into it : those who are born for 
its curse are crowded. 

Plato. It was requisite to dispel the mists of igno- 
rance and error. 

Diogenes. Has he done it ? What doubt has he eluci- 
dated, or what fact has he established ? Although I was 
but twelve years old and resident in another city when he 
died, I have taken some pains in my inquiries about him 
from persons of less vanity and less perverseness than his 
disciples. He did not leave behind him any true phi- 
losopher among them; any who followed his mode of 
argumentation, his subjects of disquisition, or his course 
of life; any who would subdue the malignant passions 
or coerce the loser ; any who would abstain from calumny 
or from cavil ; any who would devote his days to the glory 
of his country, or, what is easier and perhaps wiser, 
to his own well-founded contentment and well-merited 
repose. Xenophon," the best of them, offered up sac- 
rifices, believed in oracles, consulted soothsayers, turned 
pale at a jay, and was dysenteric at a magpie. 

Plato. He had courage at least. 

Diogenes. His courage was of so strange a quality, 
that he was ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to 
fight for Spartan or Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest 
much more, and knowest somewhat less, careth as little 

^ He who commanded, and wrote, The Anabasis. 



468 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

for portent and omen as doth Diogenes, What he would 

have done for a Persian I cannot say; certain I am that 

he would have no more fought for a Spartan than he 

would for his own father : yet he mortally hates the man 

who hath a kinder muse or a better milliner, or a seat 

nearer the minion of a king. So much for the two 

disciples of Socrates who have acquired +he greatest 

celebrity ! 

* * * 

Plato. Diogenes ! if you must argue or discourse with 

me, I will endure your asperity for the sake of your acute- 

. ness ; but it appears to me a more philosophical thing to 

avoid what is insulting and vexatious, than to breast and 

brave it. 

Diogenes. Thou hast spoken well. 

Plato. It belongs to the vulgar, not to us, to fly from 
a man's opinions to his actions, and to stalD him in his own 
house for having received no wound in the school. Otie 
merit you will allow me : I always keep my temper ; which 
you seldom do. 

Diogenes. Is mine a good or a bad one ? 

Plato. Now, must I speak sincerely? 

Diogenes. Dost thou, a philosopher, ask such a ques- 
tion of me, a philosopher ? Ay, sincerely or not at all. 

Plato. Sincerely as you could wish, I must declare, 
then, your temper is the worst in the world. 

Diogenes. I am much in the right, therefore, not to 
keep it. Embrace me : I have spoken now in thy own 
manner. Because thou sayest the most malicious things 
the most placidly, thou thinkest or pretendest thou art 
sincere. 

Plato. Certainly those who are most the masters 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 469 

of their resentments are likely to speak less erroneously 
than the passionate and morose. 

Diogenes. If they would, they might ; but the moder- 
ate are not usually the most sincere, for the same circum- 
spection which makes them moderate makes them likewise 
retentive of what could give offense : they are also timid 
in regard to fortune and favor, and hazard little. There 
is no mass of sincerity in any place. What there is must 
be picked up patiently, a grain or two at a time ; and the 
season for it is alter a storm, after the overflovving of 
banks, and bursting of mounds, and sweeping away of 
landmarks. Men v/ill always hold something back; they 
must be shaken and loosened a little, to make them let go 
what is deepest in them, and weightiest and purest. 

Plato. Shaking and loosening as much about you as 
was requisite for the occasion, it became you to demon- 
strate where and in what manner I had made Socrates 
appear less sagacious and less eloquent than he was; it 
became you likewise to consider the great difficulty of 
finding new thoughts and new expressions for those who 
had more of them than any other men, and to represent 
them in all the brilliancy of their wit and in all the majesty 
of their genius. I do not assert that I have done it ; but 
if I have not, what man has? what man has come so mgh 
to it? He who could bring Socrates, or Solon,'" or Diog- 
enes through a dialogue, without disparagement, is much 
nearer in his intellectual powers to them, than any other 
is near to him. 

Diogenes. Let Diogenes alone, and Socrates, and 
Solon. None of the thrqe ever occupied his hours in tinge- 



•0 The great lawgiver. 



470 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

ing and curling the tarnished plumes of prostitute Phi- 
losophy, or deemed anything worth his attention, care, or 
notice, that did not make men brave and independent. As 
thou callest on me to show thee where and in what manner 
thou hast misrepresented thy teacher, and as thou seemest 
to set an equal value on eloquence and on reasoning, I shall 
attend to thee awhile on each of these matters, first inquir- 
ing of thee whether the axiom is Socratic, that it is 
never becoming to get drunk, unless in the solemnities of 
Bacchus." 

Plato. This god was the discoverer of the vine and 
of its uses. 

Diogenes. Is drunkenness one of its uses, or the dis- 
covery of a god? If Pallas'^ or Jupiter hath given us 
reason, we should sacrifice our reason with more pro- 
priety to Jupiter or Pallas. To Bacchus is due a liba- 
tion of wine ; the same being his gift, as thou preachest. 

Another and a graver question. 

Did Socrates teach thee that "slaves are to be 
scourged, and by no means admonished as though they 
were the children of the master"? 

Plato. He did not argue upon government, 

Diogenes. He argued upon humanity, whereon all 
government is founded : whatever is beside it is usurpa- 
tion. 

Plato. Are slaves then never tO' be scourged, what- 
ever be their transgressions and enormities ? 

Diogenes. Whatever they be, they are less than his 
who reduced them to their condition. 

Plato. What ! though they murder his whole family ? 

" God of wine. 

" Minerva, goddess of wisdom. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 471 

Diogenes. Ay, and poison the public fountain of the 
city. 

What am I saying? and to whom? Horrible as is this 
crime, and next in atrocity to parricide, thou deemest it a 
lighter one than stealing a fig or grape. The stealer of 
these is scourged by thee ; the sentence on the poisoner is 
to cleanse out the receptacle. There is, however, a kind 
of poisoning wluch, to do tbee justice, comes before thee 
with all its horrors, and which thou wouldst punish capi- 
tally, even in such personage as an aruspex° or diviner: 
I mean the poisoning by incantation. I, and my whole 
family, my whole race, my whole city, may bite the dust 
in agony from a truss of henbane in the well; and little 
harm done forsooth! Let an idle fool set an image of 
me in wax before the fire, and whistle and caper to it, 
and purr and pray, and chant a hymn to Hecate*^ while 
it melts, entreating and imploring her that I may melt 
as easily, — and thou wouldst, in thy equity and holiness, 
strangle him at the first stave of his psalmody. 

Plato. If this is an absurdity, can you find another? 

Diogenes. Truly, in reading thy book, I doubted at 
first, and for a long continuance, whether thou couldst 
have been serious ; and whether it were not rather a satire 
on those busy-bodies who are incessantly intermeddling 

"i^/irj/ IFt'/c/i. Why, how now, Hecate ! You look angerly. 
Hec. Have I not reason, beldams as you are. 
Saucy and overbold? How did you dare 
To trade and traffic with Macbeth 
In riddles and affairs of death? 
And I, the mistress of your charms, 
The close contriver of all harms, 
Was never called to bear my part, 
Or show the glory of our art? 

—Macbeth, Act III, Scene V. 



472 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

in other people's affairs. It was only on the protesta- 
tion of thy intimate friends that I believed thee to have 
written it in earnest. As for thy question, it is idle to 
stoop and pick out absurdities from a mass of inconsist- 
ency and injustice; but another and another I could throw 
in, and another and another afterward, from any page in 
the volume. Two bare, staring falsehoods lift their beaks 
one upon the other, like spring frogs. Thou sayest that 
no punishment decreed by the laws tendeth to evil. 
What! if not immoderate? not if partial? Why then 
repeal any penal statute while the subject of its animad- 
version exists? In prisons the less criminal are placed 
among the more criminal, the inexperienced in vice to- 
gether with the hardened in it. This is part of the 
punishment, though it precedes the sentence ; nay, it is 
often inflicted on those whom the judges acquit : the law, 
by allowing it, does it. 

The next is, that he who is punished by the laws is 
the better for it, however the less depraved. What! if 
anteriorly to the sentence he lives and converses with 
worse men, some of whom console him by deadening the 
sense of shame, others by removing the apprehension of 
punishment? Many laws as certainly make men bad, as 
bad men make many laws; yet under thy regimen they 
take us from the bosom of the nurse, turn the meat about 
upon the platter, pull the bed-clothes off, make us sleep 
when we would wake, and wake when we would sleep, 
and never cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see 
us safe landed at the grave. 

* * * 

Seriously, you who wear embroidered slippers ought 
to be very cautious of treading in the mire. Philosophers 



WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 473 

should not only live the simplest lives, but should also 
use the plainest language. Poets, in employing magnifi- 
cent and sonorous words, teach philosophy the better by 
thus disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains 
and conveys the finest philosophy. You will never let 
any man hold his right station: you would rank Solon 
with Homer for poetry. This is absurd. The only re- 
semblance is in both being eminently wise. Pindar, too, 
makes even the cadences of his dithyrambics° keep time to 
the flute of Reason. My tub, which holds fifty-fold thy 
wisdom, would crack at the reverberation of thy voice. 

Plato. Farewell. 

* * *■ 

Diogenes. I mean that every one of thy whimsies 
hath been picked up somewhere by thee in thy travels ; and 
each of them hath been rendered more weak and puny by 
its place of concealment in thy closet. What thou hast 
written on the immortality of the soul goes rather to 
prove the immortality of the body; and applies as well 
to the body of a weasel or an eel as to the fairer one of 
Agathon'" or of Aster.'* Why not at once introduce 
a new religion, since religions keep and are relished in 
proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and 
out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it 
for the center; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she 
drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras 
felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they 
spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should 
confer it; and that what comprehends the past and the 
future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for- 
ever. " No," cried they, " the power of thinking is no 

"Greek beauties. 



474 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain 
may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not cor- 
poreal, it is not of this world ; its existence is eternity, its 
residence is infinity." I forbear to discuss the rationality 
of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine ; if, in- 
deed, I am to consider as one, belief and doctrine. 

Plato. As you will. 

Diogenes. I should rather, then, regard these things 
as mere ornaments; just as many decorate their apart- 
ments with lyres and harps, which they themselves look 
at from the couch, supinely complacent, and leave for 
visitors to admire and play on. 

Plato. I foresee not how you can disprove my argu- 
ment on the immortality of the soul," which, being con- 
tained in the best of my dialogues, and being often asked 
for among my friends, I carry with me. 

Diogenes. At this time? 

Plato. Even so. 

Diogenes. Give me then a certain part of it for my 
perusal, 

Plato. Willingly. 

Diogenes. Hermes" and Pallas! I wanted but a 
cubit of it, or at most a fathom, and thou art pulling it 
out by the plethron.° 

Plato. This is the place in question. 

Diogenes. Read it. 

Plato (reads). " Sayest thou not that death is the 
opposite of life, and that they spring the one from the 
other?" " Yes." " What springs then from the living?" 



^^ " Else why this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 

This longing after immortality? " — Addison's Cato. 
16 Mercury. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 475 

" The dead." "And what from the dead? " " The liv- 
ing." " Then all things alive spring from the dead." 

Diogenes. Why thy repetition? but go on. 

Plato (reads). " Souls therefore exist after death 
in the infernal regions." 

Diogenes. Where is the therefore? where is it even 
as to existence? As to the infernal regions, there is 
nothing that points toward a proof, or promises an in- 
dication. Death neither springs from life, nor life from 
death. Although death is the inevitable consequence of 
life, if the observation and experience of ages go for any- 
thing, yet nothing shows us, or ever hath signified, that 
life comes from death. Thou mightest as well say that 
a barley-corn dies before the germ of another barley- 
corn grows up from it, than which nothing is more un- 
true; for it is only the protecting part of the germ that 
perishes, when its protection is no longer necessary. The 
consequence, that souls exist after death, cannot be drawn 
from the corruption of the body, even if it were demon- 
strable that out of this corruption a live one could rise 
up. Thou hast not said that the soul is among those 
dead things which living things must spring from ; thou 
hast not said that a living soul produces a dead soul, or 
that a dead soul produces a living one. 

Diogenes. Whatever we cannot account for is in the 
same predicament. We may be gainers by being ignorant 
if we can be thought mysterious. It is better to shake 
our heads and to let nothing out of them, than to be plain 
and explicit in matters of difficulty. I do not mean in 
confessing our ignorance or our imperfect knowledge 
of them, but in clearing them up perspicuously ° : for, if 
we answer with ease, we may haply be thought good- 



476 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

natured, quick, communicative ; never deep, never saga- 
cious ; not very defective possibly in our intellectual fac- 
ulties, yet unequal and chinky, and liable to the proba- 
tion '^ of every clown's knuckle. 

Plato. The brightest of stars appear the most un- 
steady and tremulous in their light ; not from any quality 
inherent in themselves, but from the vapors that float 
below, and from the imperfection of vision in the sur- 
veyor. 

Diogenes. Draw thy robe around thee ; let the folds 
fall gracefully, and look majestic. That sentence is an 
admirable one ; but not for me. I want sense, not stars. 
What then ? Do no vapors float below the others ? and is 
there no imperfection in the vision of those who look at 
the7n, if they are the same men, and look the next 
moment ? We must move on : I shall follow the dead 
bodies, and the benighted driver of their fantastic bier, 
close and keen as any hyena. 

Plato. Certainly, O Diogenes, you excel me in eluci- 
dations and similes: mine was less obvious.'* 



" testing. 

'^As reporter of the speeches in Parliament on great occasions, 
Dr. Johnson is said to have declared that he saw to it, " The 
Whig dogs never got the best of the argument." So, it seems, 
Landor took the same unkindly care of Plato. 



GENERAL LACY AND CURA MERINO 



Merino. It was God's will. As for those rebels, the 
finger of God 

Lacy. Prythee, Sefior Curedo, let God's finger alone. 
Very worthy men are apt to snatch at it upon too light 
occasions : they would stop their tobacco-pipes with it. If 
Spain, in the opinion of our late opponents, could have 
obtained a free Constitution by other means, they never 
would have joined the French. True, they persisted : but 
how few have wisdom or courage enough to make the 
distinction between retracting an error and deserting a 
cause! He who declares himself a party-man, let hi^ 
party profess the most liberal sentiments, is a register 
and enlisted slave ; he begins by being a zealot and er 
by being a dupe; he is tormented by regret and an^ 
yet is he as incapable from shame and irresolution •. 
throwing off the livery under which he sweats and fumes, 
as was that stronger one,* more generously mad, the 
garment * empoisoned with the life-blood of the Centaur. 

Merino. How much better is it to abolish parties by 
fixing a legitimate king at the head of affairs ! 

Lacy. The object, thank God, is accomplished. Fer- 
dinand * is returning to Madrid, if perverse men do not 
mislead him. 

Merino. And yet there are Spaniards wild enough 
to talk of Cortes and Chambers of Peers. 

' Hercules, and the robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. 
2 King of Spain returning (1824) to his throne by the aid of a 
French army. 

477 



478 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Lacy. Of the latter I know nothing; but I know that 
Spain formerly was great, free, and happy, by the ad- 
ministration of her Cortes : and, as I prefer in policy old 
experiments to new, I should not be sorry if the madness, 
as you call it, spread in that direction. 

There are many forms of government, but only two 
kinds ; the free and the despotic : in the one the people 
hath its representatives, in the other not. Freedom, to be, 
must be perfect : the half-free can no more exist, even in 
idea, than the half-entire. Restraints laid by a people on 
itself are sacrifices made to liberty ; and it never exerts a 
more beneficent or a greater power than in imposing 
them. The nation that pays taxes without its own con- 
sent is under slavery : " whosoever causes, whosoever 
maintains that slavery, subverts or abets the subversion 
of social order. Whoever is above the law is out of the 
law, just as evidently as whoever is above this room is 
out of this room. If men will outlaw themselves by 
overt acts, we are not to condemn those who remove 
them by the means least hazardous to the public peace. 
If even my daughter brought forth a monster, I could 
not arrest the arm that should smother it : and monsters 
of this kind are by infinite degree less pernicious than 
such as rise up in society by violation of law. 

In regard to a Chamber of Peers, Spain does not 
contain the materials. What has been the education of 
our grandees ? How narrow the space between the horn- 
book * and sanhenito! ^ The English are amazed, and the 
French are indignant, that we have not imitated their 

3John Fiske, in his Civil Government. 
*A first book for children. 

^A garment worn by persons under trial by the Inquisition 
when they must appear in public. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 479 

Constitutions. All Constitutions formed for the French 
are provisionary. Whether they trip or tumble, whether 
they step or slide, the tendency is direct to slavery ; none 
but a most rigid government will restrain them from 
cruelty or from mischief; they are scourged into good 
humor and starved into content. I have read whatever 
I could find on the English Constitution ; and it appears 
to me, like the Deity, an object universally venerated, 
but requiring a Revelation. I do not find the House of 
Peers, as I expected to find it, standing between the 
king and people. Throughout a long series of years, it 
has been only twice in opposition to the Commons : once 
in declaring that the slave-trade ought not to be abol- 
ished ; again in declaring that those who believe in tran- 
substantiation are unfit to command an army or to decide 
a cause. 

Merino. Into what extravagances does infidelity lead 
men, in other things not unwise! Blessed virgin of the 
thousand pains ! and great Santiago of Compostella ! deign 
to bring that benighted nation back again to the right 
path. 

Lacy. On Deity we reason by attributes ; on govern- 
ment by metaphors. Wool or sand, embodied, may deaden 
the violence of what is discharged against the walls of 
a city : hereditary aristocracy hath no such virtue against 
the assaults of despotism, which on the contrary it will 
maintain in opposition to the people. Since its power 
and wealth, although they are given by the king, must be 
given from the nation, — the one has not an interest in 
enriching it, the other has. All the countries that ever 
have been conquered have been surrendered to the con- 
queror by the aristocracy, stipulating for its own prop- 



48o IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

erty, power, and rank, yielding up the men, cattle, and 
metals on the common. Nevertheless, in every nation 
the project of an upper chamber will be warmly cherished. 
The richer aspire to honors, the poorer to protection. 
Every family of wealth and respectability wishes to count 
a peer among its relatives, and, where the whole number 
is yet under nomination, every one may hope it. Those 
who have no occasion for protectors desire the power of 
protecting ; and those who have occasion for them desire 
them to be more efficient. 

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effi,gy 
and ensigns of Freedom. You would imagine that the 
British peers have given their names to beneficent insti- 
tutions, wise laws, and flourishing colonies : no such 
thing; instead of which, a slice of meat between two slices 
of bread derives its name from one ; ' a tumble of heels 
over head, a feat performed by beggar-boys on the roads, 
from another.'^ The former, I presume, was a practical 
commentator on the Roman fable of the belly and the 
tnembers, and maintained with all his power and interest 
the supremacy of the nobler part ; and the latter was of 
a family in which the head never was equivalent to the 
legs. Others divide their titles with a waistcoat,* a bon- 
net,' and a boot ; '" the more illustrious with some island 
inhabited by sea-calves." 

Merino. I deprecate such importations into our mon- 
archy. God forbid that the ermine of His Catholic Maj- 
esty be tagged with the sordid tail of a monster so rough 
as feudality ! 

^ Sandwich. 

^ Somerset. 

8 9" are left for the ' ' gentle reader. " 

"> Lord Bute. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 481 

Lacy. If kings, whether by reliance on external 
force, by introduction of external institutions, or by mis- 
application of what they may possess within the realm, 
show a disposition to conspire with other kings against 
its rights, it may be expected that communities will (some 
secretly and others openly) unite their moral, their in- 
tellectual, and, when opportunity permits it, their phys- 
ical powers against them. If alliances are holy which 
are entered into upon the soil usurped, surely not unholy 
are those which are formed for defense against all kinds 
and all methods of spoliation. If men are marked out for 
banishment, for imprisonment, for slaughter, because they 
assert the rights and defend the liberties of their country, 
can you wonder at seeing, as you must ere long, a con- 
federacy of free countries, formed for the apprehension 
or extinction of whoever pays, disciplines, or directs, 
under whatsoever title, those tremendous masses of hu- 
man kind which consume the whole produce of their 
native land in depopulating another? Is it iniquitous or 
unnatural that laws be opposed to edicts, and Constitu- 
tions to despotism? O Senor Merino! there are yet 
things holy: all the barbarians and all the autocrats in 
the universe cannot make that word a byword to the 
Spaniard. Yes, there may be holy alliances ; and the hour 
strikes for their establishment. This beautiful earth, these 
heavens in their magnificence and splendor, have seen 
things more lovely and more glorious than themselves. 
The throne of God is a speck of darkness, if you compare 
it with the heart that beats only and beats constantly to 
pour forth its blood for the preservation of our country ! 
Invincible Spain! how many of thy children have laid 
this pure sacrifice on the altar ! The Deitv hath accepted 
31 



482 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

it : and there are those who would cast its ashes to the 
winds ! 

If ever a perverseness of character, or the perfidy- 
taught in courts, should induce a king of Spain to violate 
his oath, to massacre his subjects, to proscribe his friends, 
to imprison his defenders, to abolish the representation 
of the people, Spain will be drawn by resentment to do 
what policy in vain has whispered in the ear of gener- 
osity. She and Portugal will be one: nor will she be 
sensible of disgrace in exchanging a prince of French 
origin for a prince of Portuguese. After all there is a 
northwest passage to the golden shores of Freedom; 
and, if pirates infest the opener seas, brave adventurers 
will cut their way through it. Let kings tremble at 
nothing but their own fraudulence and violence ; and 
never at popular assemblies, which alone can direct them 
unerringly. 

Merino. Educated as kings are, by pious men, serv- 
ants of God, they see a chimera in a popular assembly. 

Lacy. Those who refuse to their people a national 
and just representation, calling it a chimera, will one 
day remember that he who purchases their affections at 
the price of a chimera, purchases them cheaply ; and those 
who, having promised the boon, retract it, will put their 
hand to the signature directed by a hand of iron. State 
after State comes forward in asserting its rights, as wave 
follows wave ; each acting upon each ; and the tempest 
is gathering in regions where no murmur or voice is 
audible. Portugal pants for freedom, in other words is 
free. With one foot in England and the other in BraziJ," 



1'' Portugal for years was ruled from Rio Janeiro, the royal 

fL'.mily having been dHven from the throne by Bonaparte. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 483 

there was danger in withdrawing either : she appears 
however to have recovered her equipoise. Accustomed to 
fix her attention upon England, wisely will she act if she 
imitates her example in the union with Ireland;'' a union 
which ought to cause no other regret than in having been 
celebrated so late. If, on the contrary, she believes that 
national power and prosperity are the peculiar gifts of 
independence, she must believe that England was more 
powerful and prosperous in the days of her heptarchy 
than fifty years ago. Algarve would find no more ad- 
vantage in her independence of Portugal, than Portugal 
would find in continuing detached from the other por- 
tions of our peninsula. There were excellent reasons 
for declaring her independence at the time: there now 
are better, if better be possible, for a coalition. She, like 
ourselves, is in danger of losing her colonies : how can 
either party by any other means retrieve its loss? Nor- 
mandy and Brittany, after centuries of war, joined the 
other provinces of France : more centuries of severer 
war would not sunder them. We have no such price to 
pay. Independence is always the sentiment that follows 
liberty; and it is always the most ardently desired by 
that country which, supposing the administration of law 
to be similar and equal, derives the greatest advantage 
from the union. According to the state of society in two 
countries, to the justice or injustice of government, to 
proximity or distance, independence may be good or bad. 
Normandy and Brittany would have found it hurtful and 
pernicious: they would have been corrupted by bribery, 
and overrun by competitors, the more formidable and the 



'*In the time of the younger Pitt. 



484 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS > 

more disastrous from a parity of force. They had not, 
however, so weighty reasons for union with France, as 
Portugal has with Spain. 

Merino. To avoid the collision of king and people, 
we may think about an assembly to be composed of the 
higher clergy and principal nobility. 

Lacy. What should produce any collision, any dis- 
sension or dissidence, between king and people? Is the 
wisdom of a nation less than an individual's? Can ii 
not see its own interests: and ought he to see any other? 
Surround the throne with state and splendor and mag- 
nificence, but withhold from it the means of corruption, 
which must overflow upon itself and sap it. To no intent 
or purpose can they ever be employed, unless to subvert 
the Constitution ; and beyond the paling of a Constitution 
a king is fera naturae.^* Look at Russia and Turkey; 
how few of their czars and sultans have died a natural 
death ! — unless indeed in such a state of society the most 
natural death is a violent one. I would not accustom 
men to daggers and poisons ; for which reason, among 
others, I would remove them as far as possible from 
despotism. 

To talk of France is nugatory: England then, where 
more causes are tried within the year than among us 
within ten, has only twelve judges criminal and civil, 
in her ordinary courts. A culprit, or indeed an innocent 
man, may lie six months in prison before his trial, on sus- 
picion of having stolen a petticoat or pair of slippers. As 
for her civil laws, they are more contradictory, more dila- 
tory, more complicated, more uncertain, more expensive, 



'*A wild beast, not entitled to protection. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 485 

more inhumane, than any now in use among men. 
They who appeal to them for redress of injury suffer an 
aggravation of it ; and when Justice comes down at last, 
she ahghts on ruins. PubHc opinion is the only bulwark 
against oppression, and the voice of wretchedness is upon 
most occasions too feeble to excite it. Law in England, 
and in most other countries in Europe, is the crown of 
injustice burning and intolerable as that hammered and 
nailed upon the head of Zekkler, after he had been forced 
to eat the quivering flesh of his companions in insurrec- 
tion. In the statutes of the North American United 
States, there is no such offense as libel upon the Govern- 
ment; because in that country there is no worthless 
wretch whose government leads to, or can be brought into, 
contempt. This undefined and undefinable offense in 
England hath consigned many just men and eminent 
scholars to poverty and imprisonment, to incurable mal- 
adies, and untimely death. Law, like the Andalusian 
bull, lowers her head and shuts her eyes before she makes 
her push ; and either she misses her object altogether, or 
she leaves it immersed in bloodshed. 

When an action is brought by one subject against 
another, in which he seeks indemnity for an injury done 
to his property, his comforts, or his character, a jury 
awards the amount; but if some parasite of the king 
wishes to mend his fortune, after a run of bad luck at 
the gaming-table or of improvident bets on the race- 
course, he informs the attorney-general that he has de- 
tected a libel on Majesty which, unless it be chastised 
and checked by the timely interference of those blessed 
institutions whence they are great and glorious, would 
leave no man's office, or honor, or peace inviolable. It 



486 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

may happen that the writer, at worst, hath indulged his 
wit on some personal fault, some feature in the character 
far below the crown: this is enough for a prosecution; 
and the author, if found guilty, lies at the mercy of the 
judge. The jury in this case is never the awarder of 
damages. Are then the English laws equal for all? 
Recently there was a member of Parliament who de- 
clared to the people such things against the Government 
as were openly called seditious and libelous, both by his 
colleagues and his judges. He was condemned to pay a 
fine, amounting to less than the three-hundredth part of 
his property, and to be confined for three months — in 
an apartment more airy and more splendid than any in 
his own house. Another, no member of Parliament, wrote 
something ludicrous about Majesty, and was condemned, 
he and his brother, to pay the full half of their property, 
and to be confined among felons for two years! This 
confinement was deemed so flagrantly cruel, that the mag- 
istrates soon afterward allowed a little more light, a 
little more air, and better company; not, however, in 
separate wards, but separate prisons. The judge who 
pronounced the sentence is still living; he lives unbruised, 
unbranded, and he appears like a man among men. 

Merino. Why not? He proved his spirit, firmness, 
and fidelity : in our country he would be appointed grand 
inquisitor on the next vacancy, and lead the queen to her 
seat at the first auto da /^." Idlers and philosophers may 
complain ; but certainly this portion of the English in- 
stitutions ought to be commended warmly by' every true 



1^ The public declaration of the judgment passed on accused 
persons tried before the courts of the Spanish Inquisition, and by 
extension the infliction of the penalty. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOK 487 

Spaniard, every friend to the altar and the throne. And 
yet, General, you mention it in such a manner as would 
almost let a careless, inattentive hearer go away with the 
persuasion that you disapprove of it. Speculative and 
dissatisfied men are existing in all countries, even in 
Spain and England; but we have scourges in store for 
the pruriency of dissatisfaction, and cases and caps for 
the telescopes of speculation. 

Lacy. The faultiness of the English laws is not com- 
plained of nor pointed out exclusively by the speculative 
or the sanguine, by the oppressed or the disappointed; 
it was the derision and scoff of George the Second, " 
one of the bravest and most constitutional kings. "As 
to our laws," said he, " we pass near a hundred every 
session, which seem made for no other purpose but to 
afford us the pleasure of breaking them." 

This is not reported by Whig or Tory, who change 
principles" as they change places, but by a dispassionate, 
unambitious man of sound sense and in easy circum- 
stances, a personal and intimate friend of the king, from 
whose lips he himself received it — Lord Waldegrave. 
Yet an Englishman thinks himself quite as free, and gov- 
erned quite as rationally, as a citizen of the United States: 
so does a Chinese. Such is the hemlock that habitude 
administers to endurance ; and so long is it in this torpor 
ere the heart sickens. 

I am far from the vehemence of the English com- 
mander, Nelson" — a man, however, who betrayed 



16 The last English king who led an army. 
'7 Conservative in office; radical, out. 

>8 There is no greater name in the bloody story of naval 
warfare. 



488 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

neither in war nor policy any deficiency of acuteness and 
judgment. He says unambiguously and distinctly in his 
letters, " All ministers of kings and princes are, in my 
opinion, as great scoundrels as ever lived." 

Versatility, indecision, falsehood, and ingratitude, had 
strongly marked, as he saw, the two principal ones of his 
country, Pitt and Fox ; the latter of whom openly turned 
honesty into derision, while the former sent it wrapped 
up decently to market. Now if all ministers of kings 
and princes are, what the admiral calls them from his 
experience, " as great scoundrels as ever lived," we must 
be as great fools as ever lived if we endure them : we 
should look for others. 

Merino. Even that will not do: the new ones, pos- 
sessing the same power and the same places, will be the 
same men. 

Lacy. I am afraid then the change must not be only 
in the servants, but in the masters, and that we must not 
leave the choice to those who always choose " as great 
scoundrels as ever lived." Nelson was a person who had 
had much to do with the ministers of kings and princes r 
none of his age had more, — an age in which the ministers 
had surely no less to do than those in any other age since 
the creation of the world. Hie was the best commander of 
his nation ; he was consulted and employed in every diffi- 
cult and doubtful undertaking: he must have known 
them thoroughly. What meaning, then, shall we attrib- 
ute to his words ? Shall we say that " as great scoun- 
drels as ever lived " ought to govern the universe in per- 
petuity? Or can we doubt that they must do so, if we 
suffer kings and princes to appoint them at each other's 
recommendation ? 



WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 489 

Merino. Nelson was a heretic, a blasphemer, a revo- 
lutionist. 

Lacy. On heresy and blasphemy I am incapable of 
deciding; but never was there a more strenuous antago- 
nist of revolutionary principles ; and upon this rock his 
glor\' split and foundered. When Sir William Hamil- 
ton '" declared to the Neapolitan insurgents, who had laid 
down their arms before royal promises, that, his Govern- 
ment having engaged with the Allied Powers to eradicate 
revolutionary doctrines from Europe, he could not coun- 
tenance the fulfillment of a capitulation which opposed 
the views of the coalition, what did Nelson? He tar- 
nished the brightest sword in Europe, and devoted to the 
most insatiable of the Furies the purest blood ! A Caro- 
line and a Ferdinand," the most opprobrious of the hu- 
man race and among the lowest in intellect, were per- 
mitted to riot in the slaughter of a Caraccioli. 

The English Constitution, sir, is founded on revolu- 
tionary doctrines, and her kings acknowledge it. Recol- 
lect now the note of her diplomatist. Is England in 
Europe? H she is, which I venture not to assert, her 
rulers have declared their intention to eradicate the foun- 
dations of her liberties ; and they have broken their word 
so often that I am inclined to believe they will attempt to 
recover their credit by keeping it strictly here. But the 
safest and least costly conquests for England would be 
those over the understandings and the hearts of men. 
They require no garrisons ; they equip no navies ; they 



'9 English minister at Naples. 

^'"In June and July, 1799, I went to Naples, and, as his 
Sicilian Majesty is pleased to say, reconquered his kingdom and 
placed him on his throne." — Memoirs of Nelson' s Services. 



490 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

encounter no tempests : they withdraw none from labor ; 
they might extend from the arctic to the antarctic circle, 
leaving every Briton at his own fireside; and Earth like 
Ocean would have her great Pacific. The strength of 
England lies not in armaments and invasions: it lies in 
the omnipresence of her industry, and in the vivifying 
energies of her high civilization. There are provinces she 
cannot grasp ; there are islands she cannot hold fast ; but 
there is neither island nor province, there is neither king- 
dom nor continent, which she could not draw to her side 
and fix there everlastingly, by saying the magic words, 
Be Free. Every land wherein she favors the sentiments 
of freedom, every land wherein she but forbids them to 
be stifled, is her own; a true ally, a willing tributary, an 
inseparable friend. Principles hold those together whom 
power could only alienate. 

Merino. I understand little these novel doctrines ; but 
Democracy herself must be contented with the principal 
features of the English Constitution. The great leaders 
are not taken from the ancient families. 

Lacy. These push forward into Parliament young 
persons of the best talents they happen to pick up, whether 
at a ball or an opera, at a gaming-table or a college-mess, 
who from time to time, according to the offices they have 
filled, mount into the upper chamber and make room for 
others; but it is understood that, in both chambers, they 
shall distribute honors and places at the command of their 
patrons. True, indeed, the ostensible heads are not of 
ancient or even of respectable parentage. The more 
wealthy and powerful peers send them from their 
boroughs into the House of Commons, as they send race- 
horses from their stables to Newmarket, and cocks from 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 491 

their training-yard to Doncaster. This is, in like man- 
ner, a pride, a luxury, a speculation. Even bankrupts 
have been permitted to sit there; men who, when they 
succeeded, were a curse to their country worse than when 
they failed. 

Let us rather collect together our former institutions, 
cherish all that brings us proud remembrances, brace our 
limbs for the efforts we must make, train our youth on 
our own arena, and never deem it decorous to imitate 
the limp of a wrestler writhing in his decrepitude. 

The Chamber of Peers in England is the dormitory of 
freedom and of genius. Those who enter it have eaten 
the lotus," and forget their country. A minister, to suit 
his purposes, may make a dozen or a score or a hundred 
of peers in a day. If they are rich they are inactive ; if 
they are poor they are dependent. In general he chooses 
the rich, who always want something; for wealth is less 
easy to satisfy than poverty, luxury than hunger. He can 
dispense with their energy if he can obtain their votes, and 
they never abandon him unless he has contented them. 

Merino. Impossible! that any minister should make 
twenty, or even ten peers, during one convocation. 

Lacy. The English, by a most happy metaphor, call 
them batches, seeing so many drawn forth at a time, with 
the rapidity of loaves from an oven, and molded to the 
same ductility by less manipulation, A minister in that 
system has equally need of the active and the passive, as 
the creation has equally need of males and females. Do 
not imagine I would discredit or depreciate the House of 
Peers, Never will another land contain one composed of 

21 Like Dr. Johnson, in one of his pleasant halting places Jn 
the Hebrides. 



492 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

characters in general more honorable ; more distinguished 
for knowledge, for charity, for generosity, for equity ; 
more perfect in all the duties of men and citizens. Let 
it stand ; a nation should be accustomed to no changes, 
to no images but of strength and duration: let it stand, 
then, as a lofty and ornamental belfry, never to be taken 
down or lowered, until it threatens by its decay the con- 
gregation underneath ; but let none be excommunicated 
who refuse to copy it, whether from faultiness in their 
foundation or from deficiency in their materials. Differ- 
ent countries require different governments. Is the rose 
the only flower in the garden ? Is Hesperus the only star 
in the heavens? We may be hurt by our safeguards, 
if we try new ones. 

Don Britomarte Delciego took his daily siesta on the 
grass in the city-dyke of Barbastro: he shaded his face 
with his sombrero, and slept profoundly. One day, un- 
fortunately, a gnat alighted on his nose and bit it. Don 
Britomarte roused himself; and, remembering that he 
could enfold his anns in his mantle, took off a glove and 
covered the unprotected part with it. Satisfied at the 
contrivance, he slept again ; and more profoundly than 
ever. Whether there was any savory odor in the glove 
I know not : certain it is that some rats came from under 
the fortifications, and, perforating the new defense of 
Don Britomarte, made a breach in the salient angle which 
had suffered so lately by a less potent enemy; and he 
was called from that day forward the knight of the kid- 
skin visor. 

Merino. Sir, I do not understand stories: I never 
found wit or reason in them. 

Lacy. England in the last twenty years has under- 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 493 

gone a greater revolution than any she struggled to 
counteract — a revolution more awful, more pernicious. 
She alone of all the nations in the world hath suffered by 
that of France : she is become less wealthy by it, less free, 
less liberal, less moral. Half a century ago she was 
represented chiefly by her country-gentlemen. Pitt made 
the richer, peers ; the intermediate, pensioners ; the poorer, 
exiles ; and his benches were overflowed with " honor- 
ables " from the sugar-cask ^" and indigo-bag. He 
changed all the features both of mind and matter. Old 
mansions were converted into workhouses and barracks : 
children who returned from school at the holidays stopped 
in their own villages, and asked why they stopped. More 
oaks"' followed him than ever followed Orpheus; and 
more stones, a thousand to one, leaped down at his voice 
than ever leaped up at Amphion's."^ Overladen with 
taxation, the gentlemen of England — a class the grand- 
est in character that ever existed upon earth, the best 
informed, the most generous, the most patriotic — were 
driven from their residences into cities. Their authority 
ceased; their example was altogether lost, and it appears 
by the calendars of the prisons, that two thirds of the 
offenders were from the country ; whereas until these 
disastrous times four fifths were from the towns. To 
what a degree those of the towns themselves must have 
increased, may be supposed by the stagnation in many 



22 Not the last illustration of the political power of sugar. 
2' " He breathed his sorrows in a desert cave, 

And soothed the tiger, moved the oak, with song. 

— Landor. 

** When Amphion played upon his lyre, stones leaped up and 
took their places in the wall building around Thebes. 



494 IM'AGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

trades, and by the conversion of laborers and artisans tO 
soldiers. 

The country gentlemen, in losing their rank and con- 
dition, lost the higher and more delicate part of their 
principles. There decayed at once in them that robust- 
ness and that nobility of character, which men, like trees, 
acquire from standing separately. Deprived of their 
former occupations and amusements, and impatient of 
inactivity, they condescended to be members of gaming 
clubs in the fashionable cities, incurred new and worse 
expenses, and eagerly sought, from among the friend- 
ships they had contracted, those who might obtain for 
them or for their families some atom from the public 
dilapidation. Hence nearly all were subservient to the 
minister: those who were not were marked out as dis- 
affected to the Constitution, or at best as singular men 
who courted celebrity from retirement. 

Such was the state of the landed interest; and what 
was that of the commercial? Industrious tradesmen 
speculated; in other words, gamed. Bankers were coin- 
ers; not giving a piece of metal, but a scrap of paper. 
They who had thousands lent millions, and lost all. Slow 
and sure gains were discreditable! and nothing was a 
sight more common, more natural, or seen with more 
indifference, than fortunes rolling down from their im- 
mense accumulation. Brokers and insurers and jobbers, 
people whose education could not have been liberal, were 
now for the first time found at the assemblies and at the 
tables of the great, and were treated there with the first 
distinction. Every hand through which money passes 
was pressed affectionately. The viler part of what is 
democratical was supported by the aristocracy ; the better 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 495 

of what is republican was thrown down. England, Hke 
one whose features are just now turned awry by an apo- 
plexy, is ignorant of the change she has undergone, and 
is the more lethargic the more she is distorted. Not only 
hath she lost her bloom and spirit, but her form and gait, 
her voice and memory. The weakest of mortals was 
omnipotent in Parliament; and being so, he dreamed in 
his drunkenness that he could compress the spirit of the 
times; and before the fumes had passed away, he ren- 
dered the wealthiest of nations the most distressed. The 
spirit of the times is only to be made useful by catching 
it as it rises, to be managed only by concession, to be 
controlled only by compliancy. Like the powerful agent ^^ 
of late discovery, that impels vast masses across the ocean 
or raises them from the abysses of the earth, it performs 
everything by attention, nothing by force, and is fatal 
alike from coercion and from neglect. That government 
is the best which the people obey the most willingly and 
the most wisely ; that state of society in which the great- 
est number may live and educate their families becom- 
ingly, by unstrained bodily and unrestricted intellectual 
exertion : where superiority in office springs from worth, 
and where the chief magistrate hath no higher interest 
in perspective than the ascendency of the laws. Nations 
are not ruined by war: for convents and churches, pal- 
aces and cities, are not nations. The Messenians and 
Jews and Araucanians saw their houses and temples 
leveled with the pavement; the mightiness of the crash 
gave the stronger mind a fresh impulse, and it sprang 
high above the flames that consumed the last fragment. 

25 Steam. 



496 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

The ruin of a country is not the blight of corn, or the 
weight and impetuosity of hailstones; it is not inunda- 
tion or storm, it is not pestilence or famine : a few years, 
perhaps a single one, may cover all traces of such calam- 
ity. But that country is too surely ruined in which 
morals are lost irretrievably to the greater part of the 
rising generation; and there are they about to sink and 
perish, where the ruler has given, by an unrepressed and 
an unreproved example, the lesson of bad faith. 

Merino. Sir, I cannot hear such language. 

Lacy. Why then converse with me? Is the fault 
mine if such language be offensive? Why should intol- 
erance hatch an hypothesis, or increase her own alarm 
by the obstreperous chuckle of incubation? 

Merino. Kings stand in the place- of God among us. 

Lacy. I wish they would make way for the owner. 
They love God only when they fancy he has favored their 
passions, and fear him only when they must buy him off. 
If indeed they be his vicegerents on earth, let them repress 
the wicked and exalt the virtuous. Wherever in the ma- 
terial world there is a grain of gold, it sinks to the 
bottom ; chaff floats over it : in the animal, the greatest 
and most sagacious of creatures hide themselves in woods 
and caverns, in morasses and solitudes, and we hear first 
of their existence when we find their bones. Do }0U 
perceive a resemblance anywhere? If princes are desir- 
ous to imitate the Governor of the universe; if they are 
disposed to obey him ; if they consult religion or reason, 
or, what oftener occupies their attention, the stability cf 
power,^ — they will admit the institutions best adapted to 
render men honest and peaceable, industrious and con- 
tented. Otherwise let them be certain that, although 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 497 

they themselves may escape the chastisement they merit, 
their children and grandchildren will never be out of 
danger or out of fear. Calculations on the intensity of 
force are often just ; hardly ever so those on its durability. 

Merino. As if truly that depended on men ! — a 
blow against a superintending Providence! It always 
follows the pestilential breath that would sully the maj- 
esty of kings. 

Lacy. Senor Merino, my name, if you have forgotten 
it, is Lacy; take courage and recollect yourself. The 
whole of my discourse hath tended to keep the majesty 
of kings unsullied, by preserving their honor inviolate. 
Any blow against a superintending Providence is too 
insane for reproach, too impotent for pity : and indec 1 
what peril can by any one be apprehended from the 
Almighty, when he has Cura Merino to preach for him, 
and the Holy Inquisition to protect him ? 

Merino. I scorn the sneer, sir; and know not by 
what right, or after what resemblance, you couple my 
name with the Holy Inquisition which our Lord the King 
in his wisdom hath not yet re-established, and which the 
Holy Allies for the greater part have abolished in their 
dominions. 

Lacy. This never would have been effected if the 
holy heads of the meek usurpers "' had not raised them- 
selves above the crown; proving from doctors and con- 
fessors, from Old Testament and New, the privilege they 
possessed of whipping and burning and decapitating the 
wearer. The kings in their fright ran against the chalice 
of poison, by which many thousands of their subjects had 



' Heads of the Inquisition. 
32 



498 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

perished, and by which their own hands were, after their 
retractings and writhings, ungauntleted, undirked, and 
paralyzed. 

Europe, Asia, America, sent up simultaneously to 
heaven, a shout of joy at the subversion. Africa, seated 
among tamer monsters and addicted to milder supersti- 
tions wondered at what burst and dayspring of beati- 
tude the human race wals celebrating around her so high 
and enthusiastic a jubilee. 

Merino. I take my leave, General. May your Excel- 
lency live many years ! 

I breathe the pure street-air again. Traitor and 
atheist; I will denounce him. He has shaved for the 
last time : he shall never have Christian burial. 



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